Reaction To Diablo 3's Always-Online Requirement

Last week we discussed news that Diablo 3 will include a real-money auction house for items and require a permanent connection to the internet even for single-player games. Fan reaction has been loud and varied, with many decrying the restrictive DRM. Blizzard exec Robert Bridenbecker said he was surprised by the outrage at the online requirement, saying, "it really is just the nature of how things are going, the nature of the industry. When you look at everything you get by having that persistent connection on the servers, you cannot ignore the power and the draw of that." Some other developers came out in support of the scheme; id Software's Tim Willits said always-on would be "better for everybody" in the end. Max Schaefer, one of the makers of Diablo 3 competitor Torchlight 2, said he understands why they did it, even though Torchlight 2 is not doing the same: "... it seems that most of what they are doing is related to trying to keep a truly secure, cheat-free economy in Diablo III. Whatever you do, you have to make sacrifices. We sacrifice a cheat-free environment to give players the most options, they are sacrificing options and flexibility for security of the economy like you would in an MMO. I understand their approach and sympathize with the technical difficulties of what they are trying to do."

Comments

It seems good

[zget]

I think it's good. Sure, there are some situations where you cannot connect to internet, but it's really in minority. For the small trade-off you get cheat-free economy and you can play both single-player and multiplayer with the same characters. It's not like Blizzard will be closing down the servers anytime soon, battle.net is still running perfectly for Diablo 2. Besides, this can be mostly blamed on pirates. The 90% piracy rate on PC really means that game companies are starting increasingly to look into implementing as much of the game online as possible. While you can't play the game in an airplane, the overall return for that trade-off is much better.

Re:It seems good

[Chrisq]

Sure, there are some situations where you cannot connect to internet, but it's really in minority.

You probably wouldn't say that if you loved in a remote location. For some people connecting to the internet means driving to a wifi-enabled cafe or buying a satellite connection, i.e. the majority of situations they can't connect.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

In 80 years I'll still be able to play a lot of games, but no game with online drm will be playable then. So it's a time limited rental. And if that is the case, the price should reflect that.

Re:It seems good

[Afty0r]

You probably wouldn't say that if you loved in a remote location. For some people connecting to the internet means driving to a wifi-enabled cafe or buying a satellite connection, i.e. the majority of situations they can't connect.

Perhaps those people are not the target market for this game, then?

Re:It seems good

[schn]

I can simulate playing single and multi player with the same characters, all I have to do is make a multiplayer game and play by myself. There's no advantage. Having to be constantly online is a restriction not a trade off.

Re:It seems good

[loufoque]

Sure, there are some situations where you cannot connect to internet, but it's really in minority.

Not really. Every heard of that concept of moving out of your basement?

Whenever you're on the move, you don't have a connection.

Besides, this can be mostly blamed on pirates.

The pirate copy will likely not require Internet at all, so only legitimate users will hurt from this.

Re:It seems good

[Chrisq]

You probably wouldn't say that if you loved in a remote location. For some people connecting to the internet means driving to a wifi-enabled cafe or buying a satellite connection, i.e. the majority of situations they can't connect.

Perhaps those people are not the target market for this game, then?

Well - obviously not. But should they be denied the ability to play the game? How much further would you take it - if the next generation of Windows required to be on line would it be fair to remove their computers?

Re:It seems good

[Dayze!Confused]

Blizzard seems to be good at removing DRM with patches when they begin to stop support for it. Looking at Diablo 2 which used to required the CD to be loaded had that removed some time ago. I would like to believe that if the day comes that they stop supporting Diablo 3 that they may release a set of patches that would remove the DRM and allow for offline single player (and hopefully LAN multiplayer).

Re:It seems good

[BeShaMo]

You probably wouldn't say that if you loved in a remote location. For some people connecting to the internet means driving to a wifi-enabled cafe or buying a satellite connection, i.e. the majority of situations they can't connect.

Perhaps those people are not the target market for this game, then?

Yeah fuck them! How dare they play games when they don't even have internet.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

While you can't play the game in an airplane, the overall return for that trade-off is much better.

Is it? You're assuming that people are interested in using the online economy. From what I gather you can't get anything in the market that you can't get through playing the game anyway. I know from my perspective that I'd never be interested in paying hard cash for something that I can get in a game which I've already paid for, so are there any estimates on how many people actually would pay for it? I know gold farming etc. are common in many games, but what proportion of the players actually pay for this stuff? Providing a legitimate baked-in way to do this sounds great, but how many non-payers are being inconvenienced for the benefit of how many payers?

It makes me think of the space-sim X games. OK, they're single player, but a lof of people got into comparing stats, and there was a need for a way to identify legitimate games where people had actually worked for their battlefleets and plethora of space stations and separate them from people who had used mods or cheats. Instead of using some always-online system, the developers brought in a "modified" tag: if you messed with the game files in any way, any how, a small "modified" tag would come up on any of the screens showing anything interesting. This let people who wanted to play "legit" to play legit and be sure they weren't getting compared to people who had cheated, while people who had fun with mods and cheats weren't inconvenienced either.

Why can't they have some sort of system where if you want to be able to use a character online, you say so when you create the character, and from that point any time you use that character you *must* be online, but if you want to mess around and have fun you can hit "no" and then the software doesn't care, but won't let you use the online features they're concerned about? If nothing else it'd let you mess around with tactics and strategies using a non-certified account without worrying that your certified character is sliding down the rankings.

Re:It seems good

[dltaylor]

I agree that the trade-off has value. I haven't bought a game in a long time, and see no reason to start now, so I've saved a LOT of money compared to what I used to spend.

You do realize, don't you, that in the case of either a temporary or permanent outage, while the servers are down, you have NOTHING for the money that you spent on the game. Additionally, if/when your ISP starts counting the bytes, you will be paying THEM to play a game that you "bought" in the store or on-line.

I've got a 2K box that still plays the Windows games I bought back then, and I'm going to virtualize it for continued play of those games, plus I can run whatever runs under WINE or native on Linux.

And no, it has very little to do with piracy, regardless of the BS spewed by the game companies. Pirates fall into a very few camps: try-before-buy, since a lot of games are stinkers; never would have paid for it, regardless of how much the game is enjoyed; want a really usable version and the DRM breaks that; "yeah, I coulda bought it, but why bother if I can download a crack". I know a lot of gamers, and none of them fall into the last category, but several fall into the first and third, and those people have enough alternatives for their time and money to just skip games that don't work as well as they want, and the second category, which may be quite large, is not lost sales/revenue, unlike the last.

Re:It seems good

[EllF]

Phew. Guess I'm not either -- late 20s "core" gamer, having played previous games in the series, with disposable income. Can't play it when I am traveling for work? Whatever, Blizzard. I'll just get Torchlight 2.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, oh you! You probably even believe Valve will provide patches for all its games once they go out of business :D

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

How much further would you take it - if the next generation of Windows required to be on line would it be fair to remove their computers?

Even Microsoft can't just come around and remove your computer. If they wanted to forego sales to people who don't have internet though then there would be nothing wrong with that; you'd just have to use a different OS.

Re:It seems good

[nschubach]

Duh, obviously anyone that is not constantly connected to the Internet is a dirty pirate and deserves to have their house raided at 3am by SWAT for stealing bits.

Re:It seems good

[ch0rlt0n]

You probably wouldn't say that if you loved in a remote location...

I've loved in what I thought was a remote location, but apparently behind the sand bunker on the 17th isn't remote enough.

I'm before the judge on Tuesday :o(

Re:It seems good

[TheRaven64]

Obviously not, but many of them were the target market for Diablo II. I played it a lot and I never played it online. I either played on a LAN, with friends, or in single player. Cheating was never a problem. For people who wanted the online experience, there was battle.net, which stored everything server-side to prevent cheating. I played it a lot on the train and so on, where there was no Internet (or, expensive Internet that vanishes as soon as you go through a tunnel). I won't be buying Diablo II.

Re:It seems good

[rbrausse]

Besides, this can be mostly blamed on pirates.

The pirate copy will likely not require Internet at all, so only legitimate users will hurt from this.

exactly. some time ago I started to play Morrowind again (still fun, though the graphics are not competitive anymore) - and it sucks without the no-cd patch/crack; I don't want to plug in the external DVD drive.

the user experience with cracked software is often better than with the original shipment, so it is arguable a sane consumer choice to start with pirating.

Re:It seems good

[nschubach]

So, why do I have to suffer so your game can be cheat free?

What if I don't ever connect to anyone but my friends? I can reasonably assume my friends have not cheated so I don't need Blizzard guaranteeing that. All this is doing is adding a level of complexity that isn't needed.

Also, talk about a one sided article.

Re:It seems good

[TheRaven64]

Besides, this can be mostly blamed on pirates

Damn straight! Curse those pirates for breaking into Blizzard and adding stupid things into the middle of the design document! Something must be done!

Re:It seems good

[MysteriousPreacher]

For the small trade-off you get cheat-free economy

Any developer that manages to create a truly cheat free economy in a game of any significant scale should probably take as their next project the development of a bug free completely secure web browser. Blizzard's move will certainly make it more difficult to cheat by modifying characters and items offline, but if you believe Diablo III will be cheat free then I have a bridge you may be interested in purchasing.

While you can't play the game in an airplane, the overall return for that trade-off is much better.

Bullshit marketing speak - this is highly subjective. I've played the Diablo series from the start and have always preferred it as an offline game. The overall return may be worth it for someone with a solid Internet connection available to them whenever they wish to play, and a hankering for online play, but the reverse is true for people who prefer offline play and don't always have access to an Internet connection.

They could fix this quite easily by giving us the choice to create characters that can specifically not be played online.

Perhaps they're genuine in trying for reduce cheating. A happy side-effect of this is that requiring a persistent connection is consistent with Blizzard's attempts to turn Battlenet in to a kind of social network for owners of Blizzard titles.

Re:It seems good

[zget]

Sure, there are some situations where you cannot connect to internet, but it's really in minority.

Not really. Every heard of that concept of moving out of your basement?

I actually travel quite a lot. I lived whole last year traveling in Asia. Other than while in airplanes or on road, there really isn't that many spots where you cannot get onto internet, especially while actually staying somewhere. Even the cheapest places offered wi-fi. Besides, I would want to get online anyway.

Whenever you're on the move, you don't have a connection.

Besides, this can be mostly blamed on pirates.

The pirate copy will likely not require Internet at all, so only legitimate users will hurt from this.

Yes, and those players are also missing the multiplayer and all the extra gameplay elements to single player that online connection brings, including economy and market for items. Like I said, there's a small trade-off, but for that you get a lot more in exchange.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

One nice thing about Morrowind is one of the first patches removed the DRM scheme that was in the game, replacing it with a simple CD check, because the DRM was causing problems. Props to Bethesda for that.

Re:It seems good

[Elbereth]

Yeah, I can understand why they're doing it (given the insane piracy and cheating rates in Diablo I and II), but it's still something that I'd rather they didn't do. Personally, I played almost exclusively on battle.net (hardcore, then hardcore ladder), but there were some single player characters that also played, when my internet connection went down, battle.net was unreachable, or I needed the ability to pause the game. I played a few LAN games, too, but the vast majority of my time was spent on battle.net. A few years later, I started dating a fellow gamer and introduced her to Diablo 2. She became a huge fan, but was always too shy to play on battle.net (I guess all the teenage boys intimidated her). As a result, we played LAN games exclusively. I think she missed out on a major part of the appeal of the Diablo franchise (playing MP games on battle.net), but she never really expressed any interest at all in doing so. When I first started playing D1 and D2, I would have scoffed at the idea of anyone ever playing those games single-player or on LANs, but it eventually become clear to me that there are people who play like that and don't want to change. Speaking as someone who fits fairly well into the "MP is where the real game is" mold, it sucks that these people are being tossed aside today, with their concerns ignored. It also sucks that traditional styles of gaming are being phased out, in favor of stronger DRM and bigger profits. At least Diablo 3 still has a single player mode. It seems as though almost everyone but Bethesda has abandoned that.

I'm a pretty big fan of the original Diablo, partially because it was so bleak, dark, and intense. Diablo 2 was a really fun game, as well, but it was significantly less thematically dark. Diablo 3 seems to be continuing the trend, with it transitioning to a more standard, high fantasy theme, which a bad thing, just not the thematic direction that I personally would have taken. More so than draconian DRM, monetization of the game's economy, and the loss of LAN play, this is what worries me most of all. I'm a pretty big fan of Leonard Boyarsky, so I'm trusting that he'll do a good job. It's just a bit frustrating to hear that him talk about how the Diablo franchise is "too dark". Ugh. Oh well. Even if it's got unicorns shitting rainbows and candy, it'll probably still be fun.

Sucks that I'm going to be thinking about that ex-girlfriend every time I play Diablo 3, but, man, she was even more fucked up than me (and that's saying something). Last I heard, she was considering sex reassignment surgery.

Re:It seems good

[Windwraith]

You myopic, apologetic fool.

People like you are the cause such DRM schemes go forward, you disgust me.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well - obviously not. But should they be denied the ability to play the game? How much further would you take it - if the next generation of Windows required to be on line would it be fair to remove their computers?

The structure of this game is more like an MMO than anything else. Do you also complain about how people without internet are ignored for the sake of the MMO crowd?

Because of the things blizzard is doing this move is needed to help stave of some serious issue that can arise with RMT. I think they are bold for doing this and it makes sense why they would. In this iteration of the series SP has taken a backseat, especially given the popularity of MP in D2. If you don't like it, don't buy it. It is not aimed at those who have trouble with the internet. Your troubles with the internet does not supersede the design and direction of the game.

Re:It seems good

[zget]

No, but why should other people get less fun gaming experience just because some people play in weird locations or they just don't like DRM? There are plenty of other games for you. Instead of bitching about Blizzards decision to provide a cheat-free, good economy for the game why don't you go buy games from other developers and, you know, actually support those companies that don't do stuff that you don't like?

Re:It seems good

[Neil Boekend]

For the small trade-off you get cheat-free economy

Cheat-free is only applicable in online multiplayer games. You have to be online for that anyways so it doesn't have to be a problem. However playing a single player offline game shouldn't require a connection.

and you can play both single-player and multiplayer with the same characters

How is having the ability to use the same character for single and multiplayer games affected by this "always on" DRM?

Remember if you limit the game by DRM only the pirates will have the games without limits!

Re:It seems good

[Dhalka226]

I was going to buy Diablo III. I really enjoyed D1 and D2 and I had no problem whatsoever with the idea of giving them my money for D3. But now, I will pirate it. Guaranteed. Because I don't have a connection it can use? Because it's inconvenient? Nope. To shove it right in their fucking faces. Maybe I'll mail them a copy of my receipt for whatever game I choose to buy instead just for funsies.

How's that "anti-piracy measures that only hurt legitimate customers" thing working out for ya so far, Blizz?

Re:It seems good

[Gaygirlie]

For the small trade-off you get cheat-free economy

Unfortunately that's a pipe-dream: you lose the ability to play without Internet-connection AND you'll still have to suffer cheaters in multiplayer-games. Just take a look at WoW: you can find hundreds of bots, cheats that allow you to fly/run faster than other players, go underground so you're unattackable, wall-climb and so on and so forth. Diablo III will not be any different.

Besides, if you get your account stolen you won't even be able to play SINGLE-PLAYER until you get it back. IF you get it back at all.

Doesn't sound like a fair trade-off to me.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

That seems like a bit of a strawman to me. Analogously Windows is to Diablo as air is to oil.

Re:It seems good

[Jonah Hex]

Bastardization of one of Raph's laws: Never trust the client or the middlemen, and look askance at your own servers. As important as items are in the Diablo world, this is the way to go.

HEX

Re:It seems good

[Elbereth]

What about Linux support? Blizzard ports all their games to the Mac, but they've expressed absolutely no interest in porting to Linux. Are they fucking over the Linux users? Or are the Linux users just not in the demographic that they're shooting for?

Re:It seems good

[Targon]

Good economy only applies to multi-player. If you don't care about multi-player and just want to play single-player, then there shouldn't be the restriction for being online. It wouldn't be difficult to make it so multi-player is always online while single-player can be offline.

Re:It seems good

[Vaphell]

less fun? what separate offline single player has to do with fun people have on bnet? oh, that's right - nothing.

Re:It seems good

[Elbereth]

If I'm still playing video games in fifty years, I'll be so fucking happy to be alive that I won't care about DRM.

Re:It seems good

[Targon]

And, if you want to play single-player, you shouldn't need that online connection. What do you get for being online in a single-player game?

Re:It seems good

[zippthorne]

Instead of pirating it, and thereby giving them your mind-share and potential future purchases, you could just not play it at all. Which hurts them even more and gives you something to do with that other game you bought for its receipt.

Re:It seems good

[Afty0r]

Well - obviously not. But should they be denied the ability to play the game? How much further would you take it - if the next generation of Windows required to be on line would it be fair to remove their computers?

How is this significantly different from requiring a certain generation of graphics card? Or a minimum amount of RAM? Or having a PC instead of a Mac?

In order to provide the game experience they want to provide (which is what you're paying for) the developers have decided to place certain requirements on the equipment required to play. If you don't have the required equipment, you will be unable to play.

I really don't understand all the hoo-ha - maybe the people who don't have a reliable net connection should buy one of the MYRIAD of competing products which don't have that requirement?

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nothing to do with preventing cheating (online multiplayer always requires an internet connection - how's that worked out for preventing cheating so far? I'd say hit and miss at best) and everything to do with protecting their in game economy. They don't want people modding their own uber weapons and bypassing the market (or flooding the market with cheap uber weapons and destroying the value). This measure is everything to do with the Blizzard making money without ever having to sell more copies and virtually zero to do with cheating, piracy or whatever other fud they'll come out with next.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just a bit frustrating to hear that him talk about how the Diablo franchise is "too dark".

And this alone is probably why i WONT buy D3 it is meant to be dark and foreboding game. a game where demons from hell are upon earth. Hell isnt full of pixies that will spray you with flowers its about demons that will rip your guts out and use your eyeballs as grapes. I used to love walking through dungeons and looking at all the torture devices and and the random groups of bodies just lying on the floor, and from what ive seen its gone too much like WOW.

Re:It seems good

[BRSloth]

Sure, there are some situations where you cannot connect to internet, but it's really in minority.

The problem with "always online" DRM is not that "there are situations that you can't connect to the internet". The problem is that you rely heavily on the other site and the medium for it to work flawlessly.

Let me give you an example (there is a problem with it and I reckon right from the start): It's a matter of only 2 or 3 years that Blizzard changed the maintenance cycle of their oceanic servers in WoW to coincide with the Oceanic timezone. Before that, any WoW player in Australia (for example) would get home on Tuesday and find that the maintenance cycle had just started. And that it was later extended another another for whatever reason.

Reports of Blizzard losing connecting to whole networks (like AT&T) happened even recently.

Now imagine that you finally got a day off. It's a rainy day, there is nothing going on, so you decide to play Diablo 3. And then you get the news that the servers are down or that there is a problem with the connection of Blizzard and your provider or Anonymous got ripped off in some Real Money AH and decided to bomb Battle.net login servers. Now what?

There are too many variables to give you an 100% fun experience with it.

I have no problems if they required a Battle.net account with a registered Diablo 3 key in it to play multiplayer (i.e., the lack of LAN play). My problem is that I may want to have a quick fix and I have to go to a check list to make sure I'll have fun.

Re:It seems good

[Elbereth]

....or you could not be a douchebag with an entitlement complex and boycott the game, without pirating it.

Re:It seems good

[Vaphell]

i am curious: do you consider lag to belong to that 'a lot more in exchange' thing?
What if someone couldn't care less about achievements and prefers to play alone with no unnecessary lag? I know i do, i played SP 99% of the time, i had quite a few hardcore chars solo and i wouldn't do that if the network lag could kill my char while i am unable to prevent it in any way.

please, stop with the false dichotomy. Offline and secure online are not mutually exclusive.

Re:It seems good

[zget]

It motivates people to get online and play within the economy and the world. You don't play MMO's as single player either, Blizzard has obviously designed the game more like an MMO than a traditional game. You don't complain about lack of single player in MMO games either, do you?

Re:It seems good

[PopeRatzo]

No, but why should other people get less fun gaming experience just because some people...

Whoa there. Now you've made the jump to always online DRM making the game a more fun gaming experience? I have played Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 and I can't think of a single reason that turning it into yet another shitty MMO is going to make it a "more fun gaming experience". We have a long history showing that whenever a major change is made to a game just so that a more-restrictive DRM scheme could be implemented it has never, ever made the game better. Do you really believe that the online and "MMO-like" elements of Diablo 3 were added first or do you think they added them strictly because they're looking for a way to add DRM? What are the odds that an element added for that reason is going to actually make a game better?

No BS, friend, who do you work for?

Re:It seems good

[Targon]

And this is why The Witcher 1 and 2 are better games, because they appeal to those who want that darker game world. I am also sick of the "let's make all games for teenagers, and ignore that there are more adults out there playing games" attitude out there right now.

Re:It seems good

[delinear]

Same story here - I had many hours of fun playing both solo and multi D II. Multi for me was all about co-op, not PVP. I can understand measures to prevent cheating in PVP but co-operatively who are you cheating? The computer? I've already canceled my pre-order. If someone who has been a fan of the series since day one, has had a pre-order on the game for the last two years and actually bought a £2k gaming laptop to be able to play this on the move isn't their target audience then screw 'em. It wouldn't be the first time the fans of a series were sold down the river to make a quick buck, maybe some sanity will return around the time we're talking about D IV.

Re:It seems good

[delinear]

So the time we get to play the game DRM free is around about the time everyone else loses interest and the community has pretty much moved on? I'll pass.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you say that now, but you can never predict all possible scenarios of the future.
What happens if their buildings burn down? Oh, bye all that progress, bye game.

Little extreme, but it is to make you see a point.
Anything could happen in the next 5 years, the company could disastrously fall apart and fail, leaving you with no more game(s) to play.

Then who will you turn to?

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that someone disables the BR-player in your PS3 with a firmware update in the meantime ...

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah cause all the "core" games I know play offline... nobody in the world begged for WoW offline or a single player edition of Counter-Strike, get real, gaming is done with humans not computers (insert any noob comment)

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'll mail them a copy of my receipt for whatever game I choose to buy instead just for funsies.

Here's a better idea - don't pirate it, don't play it at all, and mail them your receipt for Torchlight 2.

Re:It seems good

[Holammer]

The pirate copy will likely not require Internet at all, so only legitimate users will hurt from this.

It is quite possible that loot distribution is handled by Blizzard servers, rendering any off-line pirate copy useless anyway. This is of course baseless speculation, but I suspect this because they emphasise the player driven economy with in-game auctions/store and such. They can't just let people receive valuable loot without some control. Especially when there is real money involved.

Re:It seems good

[ifrag]

but if you believe Diablo III will be cheat free

Where exactly is the line drawn on cheat-free exactly? I'd say they can probably stop item duping and hacked items with ridiculous stats. My guess is the majority of "cheating" in D3 is going to trend towards farming bots. With official approved real money auctions, the motivation for highly advanced bots is going to be that much higher.

Re:It seems good

[AngryDeuce]

You don't complain about lack of single player in MMO games either, do you?

No, but Diablo III isn't an MMO. If they wanted to make it an MMO, they should have just done that. Instead it seems like they want to make a half-assed Single-Player/MMO-ish hybrid.

I can't wait until the Chinese gold farmers descend upon Diablo 3, though. That's definitely gonna make for an awesome online experience for the rest of us

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm still playing video games in fifty years, I'll be so fucking happy to be alive that I won't care about DRM.

Isn't that Snow White's job?

Re:It seems good

[tero]

Whenever you're on the move, you don't have a connection.

Really?!?!
What kind of dark age do you live that don't have 3G mobile USB sticks?

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with this post - and besides, this is just another annoying feature that people who pirate the game won't have to deal with. Also, the 90% piracy rate is largely irrelevant. Here's another perspective.

Re:It seems good

[peragrin]

I live in a mid sized city in new york state. My time warner cable connection drops randomly, several times a week, forcing me to reload and reenter things like forms(slashdot posts). It is saturatedand Time warner is cheap. I dont have an always on connection so now i cant play diablo III except for early in the morning.

Cable connectioms across the country arent stable enough leaving 100 million potentioal users in the dirt.

How about servicemen in afgahnistan? Or on deployment on ships? They cant play it either. They cant even play Starcraft againist each other in their down time.

Assuming an always on connection is always wrong.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

NO it can't ! It can't be mostly blamed on pirates !

  Diablo 2 was one the most successful PC games of all times ! what's to be blamed ? they made hundreds of millions of a $12 millions dollars investment FFS ! (9 for D2 and 3 for LOD iirc)

  The golden rule of fighting piracy (as demonstrated by the blatant FAIL of drm and such) is the following :

  If your anti-piracy system has a negative effect on the consumer experience of your PAID LEGIT clients THEN your system is bad.

  If someone somewhere has 1 argument (a SINGLE ONE) on how preventing me from playing solo without internet connection is going to make the closed battle.net safer I'm all ears, but I'm 99,999999999999999999999999999999% sure there isn't. It's not about fighting cheating (WHO GIVES A FUCK ABOUT SINGLE PLAYER CHEATING ? SERIOUSLY !)

  It's about make a big mistake and making the legit paid customers pay for the pirates. Well thanks Blizzard but no Thanks !

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well - obviously not. But should they be denied the ability to play the game? How much further would you take it - if the next generation of Windows required to be on line would it be fair to remove their computers?

How is this significantly different from requiring a certain generation of graphics card? Or a minimum amount of RAM? Or having a PC instead of a Mac?

Yeah, I'd recommend that the people who complain just move house to somewhere where Internet access is easier to come by. That's pretty much the same as buying a better graphics card.

Trends continuing, there might be a business model there - game producers teaming up with real estate firms and construction companies: "Buildings on this site are certified to run Diablo 4!"

Re:It seems good

[poetmatt]

calling a vocal majority a minority just shows people how out of touch with reality they are.

Being online will not prevent cheating, but it will ensure that you can't play diablo without an internet connection. Guess what? That's a fucking problem. Can't do lan parties like that either.

There is no return for this shit. The game could still be anti-cheat without being "online only". Piracy has nothing to do with "online only" your magic 90% piracy rate means that you're full of shit. If you can't profit and blame piracy, you're in a legacy business and don't know that we're in 2011. I take that back, there is a return - it's all to the CEO and VP - they treat people like shit and profit from it.

Re:It seems good

[FictionPimp]

People like myself, who buy lots of video games and have always bought their products are apparently not their target market.

Fine with me. I'm sick of all this DRM stuff. I'll just have to find a more meaningful use of my money then buying video games.

That's their right, so I won't complain about it anymore. I just wanted to let them know that I was going to buy diablo 3. I don't like the direction their company is headed, I won't be buying their products.

Re:It seems good

[poetmatt]

People are going to buy a game. Are you saying "tough shit you can't play it?" due to having a spotty connection? You just cut off approximately 50% of the market *AND* gave them a reason to pirate the game: so that they can play it at all.

Welcome to "why piracy exists 101". It's not "to get shit for free" it's to be able to use something they purchased in the way they intended.

Re:It seems good

[Trilkin]

"cheats that allow you to fly/run faster than other players, go underground so you're unattackable, wall-climb and so on and so forth"

Wat. Are you talking about WoW or EQ1? I can do all of those things in EQ1 with MacroQuest, no problem, but Blizzard's implementation of Warden in WoW pretty much detects all of those. It tends not to detect simple bots (purposefully, I think,) but anything that starts altering memory addresses triggers Warden. If the client-side implementation doesn't trigger it (due to a hook or something,) the server-side implementation definitely will.

Re:It seems good

[jo_ham]

They don't port to the Mac, they simultaneously develop the Windows and Mac versions side by side as they always have done since the early days.

There has been much talk about a Linux WoW client over the years, and I believe they had some internal builds for testing, but ultimately it's a marketshare problem that is further compounded because you can get their games to run in Wine. Linux gaming is where Mac gaming was several years ago - some dedicated developers who release on the platform (and do more than just a shitty port job), but struggling to see the economic sense of supporting a platform with such a small marketshare.

Re:It seems good

[darthdavid]

You forgot hoarders. I know a number of people with terabytes of pirated games, software and music on their computer that they use little if any of. They pirate because they enjoy being part of the community and/or just like collecting shit.

Re:It seems good

[AngryDeuce]

What do you get for being online in a single-player game?

The honor of clicking through 6 screens of "NOW ON SALE IN THE BLIZZARD STORE!!!!!!!"

Re:It seems good

[jonwil]

I am also a long time Diablo II fan (and intend to get back to playing with my Barbarian sometime in the future) and have played both single player and direct-connect online with friends (and lan in the days when I used to go to lan parties).

What Blizzard SHOULD have done for this game is made 2 different setups, one where you connect through battle.net and play on their server with all the anti-cheat and real-money-trading and good economy and etc. This would be playable with one player in a single "instance" of the game world or with multiple players in the same "instance".

Then they could have a normal Diablo 2 style offline/lan/direct connect setup without the need to be always online and without real-money-trading etc.

I suspect the REAL reason not to have the offline stuff is because its become essentially impossible to prevent piracy of pc games without some kind of phone home/always online setup.

Re:It seems good

[peragrin]

I dont play MMO i have a life and MMO's assume you dont. I have maybe 4 hours aweek to play games. I cant play anything that requires me to wait an hour before letting me play just to get into town and wait around for the next mission to reset from the last group.

So no i dont complain only because i dont play them.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well - obviously not. But should they be denied the ability to play the game? How much further would you take it - if the next generation of Windows required to be on line would it be fair to remove their computers?

How is this significantly different from requiring a certain generation of graphics card? Or a minimum amount of RAM? Or having a PC instead of a Mac?

In order to provide the game experience they want to provide (which is what you're paying for) the developers have decided to place certain requirements on the equipment required to play. If you don't have the required equipment, you will be unable to play.

I really don't understand all the hoo-ha - maybe the people who don't have a reliable net connection should buy one of the MYRIAD of competing products which don't have that requirement?

Only those are not determined by where you live, unless it is a 3rd world country. If that is the case, then I think there are other things to fuss about than playing Diablo 3.

The real issue is that there is no apparent gain for being always connected for single player. I do see what they want to do, but I don't see enough incentive to want me to connect all the time.

Blizzard's vice president of online technology said:

He also claimed that the always-on requirement has absolutely nothing to do with DRM. "I don't think [DRM] ever came up when we talked about how we want connections to operate," he said. So why not just make an offline mode for people who want to play that way? "You're introducing a separate user flow, a separate path that players are going to go down," he explained. "And, at the end of the day, how many people are going to want to do that?"

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. I guess Blizzard just doesn't want my business. They can keep their Diablo II with it's always connected DRM, I'll be getting Torchlight 2 and Grim Dawn instead.

Re:It seems good

[AngryDeuce]

Oh, don't worry, I'm still you'll just be a "lost sale" to them, even if you never had any intention of buying the game in the first place.

Re:It seems good

[virg_mattes]

Well, most of their (recent) titles run out of the box on WINE, so there's not a ton of motivation to port when Linux users can run the Windows version.

Virg

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

mod up mod up! its isnt a MMO its a realtime FPS Roleplaying I think.. although i am not leet in games.. i am so not buying this game now It looked cool and all but sorry they pissed me off.

Re:It seems good

[Eskarel]

One where mommy doesn't pay my data bill perhaps.

Re:It seems good

[AngryDeuce]

Wish I could mod you up...

Re:It seems good

[Squapper]

Why not just connect your laptop to your smartphone by tethering to get a reliable connection and play? Or hook it up to the wifi network of the train or bus?

Oh wait, you aren't living in the us, are you? ;)

Re:It seems good

[MysteriousPreacher]

Where exactly is the line drawn on cheat-free exactly?

Anything that runs contrary to Blizzard's terms of use. Nothing Blizzard allows in their own game can be considered to be cheating - at least in the broad sense of the term. Players will have their "meta-rules" to define additional types of cheating, but on the whole they are useful mainly for generating drama.

I recall in WoW people complaining about people using potions or certain cool-down abilities during duels, and in StarCraft and WarCraft there'd be nonces who'd whine about opponents being "unfair" because they'd go out and attack their opponents' base before they've had a chance to build up a decently-sized army.

Re:It seems good

[twocows]

That's asinine. System requirements exist to give people an idea of what hardware is necessary to play the game. You can still try to play the game on lower hardware requirements, but it might not run very well. It's a physical barrier and they're giving you an idea of what the lowest configuration is. Always-online is just nonsense by Blizzard; it has nothing to do with physical barriers. There's nothing about single player that requires an internet connection EVER. LAN is arguable, I think it's extremely important but obviously Blizzard would rather shaft the customer as usual. Always-on is not a physical barrier, it is a virtual barrier. There could easily be an option on the main screen that says "offline mode" (hell, even Steam and Starcraft II have offline modes, though the former needs to be started in the absence of an internet connection to get to it). The game could easily run without an internet connection if Blizzard just flipped a bit somewhere. But no, they want to give people like me who are often on the move the shaft because they think it will make them a few more dollars. Fuck that. I've already canceled my pre-order. I'll be doing exactly what you said: taking my business elsewhere.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty good thanks

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

well, it is different, because getting more ram/better processor does not mean you have to move and live somewhere else. My father lives in the countryside, and he bought Diablo 1, diablo 2 , the expansion packs for both. He has a crappy 3g phone connection to check his emails. He will, for sure, change his computer to have diablo 3, but he won't move to the city to be able to play it.

Re:It seems good

[poena.dare]

Why does Blizzard hate our troops?

Re:It seems good

[Kashgarinn]

I really hope every single review will advertise the fact that this isn't a computer game like every other computer game, it's an Online computergame, so you can only play it Online, thus you really should be comparing it with World of Warcraft and others like that.

For me it won't be a problem as I'm always connected, but I'm not 100% sure I'll buy it, I might use some "means" to try it out to see if I actually like it first.

It's cheaper though than World of Warcraft, you don't have to pay subscription.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that research has shown that simply lowering prices to reasonable levels actually lowers piracy rates. As a software developer I can understand the desire to make the move but there are much better ways to prevent piracy.

To be honest I think this move is because of the extensive item fraud in the game. I don't think it will help much, in fact I think that we will see a more creative item fraud development evolve. I learned to program among game hackers, and as such I understand how this is a challenge especially to the more experienced hackers. Heck even the newbs will probably take a stab at it now that there is a potential for financial gain. This also means that bliz will probably be sending lawyers after hackers. So this will probably mean the end of playing bliz games for me, as half the fun of the game was hacking it to see what I could do, and I have no desire to be hunted down by a lawyer.

So thanks bliz for ruining the experience for us hackers who just hack for fun. And you should expect to see a team of children in sweatshops in china wasting their time playing your game rather than going to school to get an education. But i guess that almighty dollar rules. (I hope this game gets boycotted)

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

If you buy software that can only be used online, and then get mad you can't use it offline...then yes, you deserve to have your computer taken away.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this significantly different from requiring a certain generation of graphics card? Or a minimum amount of RAM? Or having a PC instead of a Mac?

In order to provide the game experience they want to provide (which is what you're paying for) the developers have decided to place certain requirements on the equipment required to play. If you don't have the required equipment, you will be unable to play.

I really don't understand all the hoo-ha - maybe the people who don't have a reliable net connection should buy one of the MYRIAD of competing products which don't have that requirement?

Well just off hand this is different from hardware requirements for 2 reasons. Once you buy the hardware you don't have to keep paying for it, and the price of hardware goes down as it gets older. How many ISP's do you know of that have dropped their rates lately?

Re:It seems good

[nfc_Death]

Why offer a single player element at all?

Re:It seems good

[MattSausage]

This may be, and on the PC, I'll admit piracy is probably an issue. Lord knows I pirated games like crazy until I realized what I was doing and matured enough to realize that expecting something for nothing was for children, not grown men.

But what does bother me about this, is that Blizzard isn't SAYING this is what the issue is. Blizzard is pretending it is to keep people from 'cheating'. Cheating in single player?? Cheating who; themselves? This comes off as a damn near lie from Blizzard, and it stinks of the Marketing dept. having too much sway over the developers.

And on top of that, does anyone here on Slashdot TRULY believe this will stop the pirates? How hard would it be to spoof a server connection? Pirates have been doing that for years. Now all Blizzard has done is guarantee that people without an always on internet connection HAVE to pirate the game.

Re:It seems good

[AngryDeuce]

Let me give you an example (there is a problem with it and I reckon right from the start): It's a matter of only 2 or 3 years that Blizzard changed the maintenance cycle of their oceanic servers in WoW to coincide with the Oceanic timezone. Before that, any WoW player in Australia (for example) would get home on Tuesday and find that the maintenance cycle had just started. And that it was later extended another another for whatever reason.

Square-Enix was notorious for doing that with Final Fantasy XI; the maintenance cycle always fell during Japanese off-hours (since they are a Japanese company and all) so when they'd turn the servers off in the middle of the night there us North American players would get the shaft in our prime time. They also never heard of the concept of doing many small updates as opposed to one big one, so every couple months the game would just be down for hours...and because the updates were coming from the same place in Japan (i.e., no swarm-based updates like Blizzard) and you had the entire North American market logging in together to get that ginormous update, what would have been a 4 hour download on a good connection turned into an 8 hour one. I once had an update literally take 14.5 hours to complete in that game on a high-speed connection.

I'm sure Blizzard will do better than that, but still, tying more games to the functionality of my already shaky internet connection (Charter fucking sucks) seems like it's just going to hamper me from playing the game. The hackers and cheats will find a way around their DRM, they always do.

Re:It seems good

[djnforce9]

The significant difference is that it is a system requirement that does not need to be there. Having a particular video card is essential for computer to actually run the game whereas an internet connection active on a single player campaign is not (especially if its only purpose is increased DRM). Now if Blizzard decided to stream content to the game and have unique quests (or other elements) popping up in-game during different days, THEN such a connection would be justified as you would otherwise lose access to that extra content. Hopefully Blizzard does something else with this "always online" requirement outside of keeping tabs on who actually paid money for the game. It would certainly be a good motivator to buy because you would get more out of the game than someone whom pirated and was left with a fixed amount of content. Re-playability would be much higher too because there would always be more to do.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it better I was actualy looking forward to playing Diablo 3 but as I have a poor internet connection I will probably not bother now. I live quite a long way from the telephone exchange and there is no access to fiber either.

I tried dragon age but it is so hard when you are dropping of line all the time it makes the game hardly playable a lot of the time.

Re:It seems good

[Targon]

That is why Dungeons and Dragons Online still has one of the best designs for a MMO until you hit the high end game, less waiting overall. The only reason I quit was because new content was being released too slowly for my taste, and at the high end, you really are forced to have a group to do anything really challenging.

Re:It seems good

[nfc_Death]

No, they chose to be interested in a piece of software.
I'm interested in refrigeration for my food. Why should I need an internet connection in order to store my food in a refrigerator?
All I need is electricity, if the entity making the fridge decides I need a totally extraneous, and non-related subscription to some other service to store my food, guess who's fridge I wont buy?

Re:It seems good

[tbannist]

I know graphics cards can be a bit pricey, however, a new graphics card rarely requires that you change jobs and move to a part of the country with better Internet access.

I wouldn't be affected by the problem of an Inadequate Internet connection, mine was good enough to play WoW (and go on 40 man raids), but I won't be buying Diablo 3 (I own a copy of both Diablo and Diablo 2). Frankly, I probably wouldn't have bought it anyway, but this always on restriction validates my decision. Frankly, as far as I'm concerned the Blizzard that produced the games that I used to love is dead. It died shortly after it sold out to Vivendi.

Re:It seems good

[peragrin]

Did you not read my post? I have an always on connection from a major ISP. It isnt always on. At work all of our branches across upstate NY use Time Warner business class and guess what once a week one of the branches loses their connection for 2-4 hours shutting down that branch. We use VOIP phones, VPN to corporate, lose TW shuts down the branch from working. If businesses dont have a reliable always on connection then why are you ignorant that home users do?

Re:It seems good

[cob666]

Well - obviously not. But should they be denied the ability to play the game? How much further would you take it - if the next generation of Windows required to be on line would it be fair to remove their computers?

How is this significantly different from requiring a certain generation of graphics card? Or a minimum amount of RAM? Or having a PC instead of a Mac?

In order to provide the game experience they want to provide (which is what you're paying for) the developers have decided to place certain requirements on the equipment required to play. If you don't have the required equipment, you will be unable to play.

I really don't understand all the hoo-ha - maybe the people who don't have a reliable net connection should buy one of the MYRIAD of competing products which don't have that requirement?

Because I don't believe that being online can add anything so beneficial to single player mode that it is required. Oh, there is that pesky DRM thing.

Re:It seems good

[Grismar]

This is exactly the whole problem with "outrage at [ (lack of ) Feature X ] of [ game Y ]" in general.

Gamers act like they have some sort of right to be included in the release of the next version of their favorite game. Sometimes developers go out of their way to include them, for PR purposes or to maintain a hold of a very niche target audience. For example, CCP keeping support for graphics hardware in their EVE Online that seems ancient by regular FPS and even MMO standards. In other cases, developers go in the opposite direction and exclude the majority, like in the case of Crysis and its hardware requirements at the time.

So yes, if Blizzard decides it can do without people living in remote locations buying this title, they will exclude them. They have every right to and they already did so before with their cash cow WoW, so it's not like they need those people to make the product viable.

The comparison with an OS is just silly. Are you seriously saying that you feel the need to be able to play a specific type of game is at all comparable to having access to an up to date operating system? If there is a market in catering to the need of the remote and otherwise internet-less customers, some companies will certainly jump in and provide products. There's a market for OSes, even there, I doubt there is one for primarily multiplayer games. But if there isn't, it's tough luck. I don't expect to see a lot of sushi restaurants, massage parlors, champagne bars or vegetarian quicky marts in rural areas either.

Re:It seems good

[stjobe]

You don't play MMO's as single player either

Oh, you'd be surprised at how many people treat MMOs as single-player games.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sure, there are some situations where you cannot connect to internet, but it's really in minority."

I live about 4 hours drive from NY city in a county where less than half of the population has access to anything other than dial-up, and the companies have no plan to extend the network. I am one of the lucky ones but my connection is still crap with frequent hiccups. Broad-band always on connections are less common than one might think. And I really don't understand what the problem is with allowing a split between multi-player and solo. Just don't allow the solo characters to be used in the multiplayer environment and let those with a connection enjoy their 'real' money auction house and cheat 'free' pvp.

Re:It seems good

[dintech]

Exactly. But, anything short of "rusty dildo user on mouse button 3" and I'm still going to buy it. Sorry.

Re:It seems good

[Dix_sw]

That was exactly my reaction...

I have a good connection, and I don't care: I don't want to be forced to ask permission every time I want to play the game. I'm not 12 :/

Also, didn't Bioware/EA cancel someone's account for criticizing them on their forums? Oh, sorry, it turns out "it was a mistake", "we would never do that"

Re:It seems good

[Targon]

The problem with Linux is that there is very little standardization on the Linux side of things. Which distribution do you have, 32 bit vs. 64 bit? What library versions do you have? What about the windowing system, since there is more than just one? It really makes it difficult to release a product when Linux has so much variety based on what the system owner wants it to look like. And then you DO have the issues of hardware support, where Blizzard would need to help troubleshoot why your fresh Debian install doesn't get sound on your machine but your friend who has a one year old Redhat machine can run it perfectly...think you would be happy to have support tell you they don't provide support and the problem is with your Linux install? Would you accept that if you were running Windows and had them tell you to contact Microsoft for anything that doesn't work?

Re:It seems good

[nfc_Death]

So you're advocating further complication to simply enjoy entertainment?
Please extract your head from your ass, it seems all the technology you've attached to it in order to simply enjoy life has made it hard for you to remove it from your posterior in order to see the cognitive dissonance you're spouting.

Re:It seems good

[snowgirl]

No, but why should other people get less fun gaming experience just because some people...

Whoa there. Now you've made the jump to always online DRM making the game a more fun gaming experience? I have played Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 and I can't think of a single reason that turning it into yet another shitty MMO is going to make it a "more fun gaming experience". We have a long history showing that whenever a major change is made to a game just so that a more-restrictive DRM scheme could be implemented it has never, ever made the game better. Do you really believe that the online and "MMO-like" elements of Diablo 3 were added first or do you think they added them strictly because they're looking for a way to add DRM? What are the odds that an element added for that reason is going to actually make a game better?

No BS, friend, who do you work for?

I'm on the verge of thinking that you're falling the other way in the argument, in automatically assuming a malicious motive for adding this stuff.

It can entirely be that there is a synergy. They want to enhance the game (which I will grant, always-online can add some really cool enhancements to the regular gameplace) but that's the point, these are enhancements and should thusly not be mandatory. Sure, my X-Box 360 does some really cool things when it's online... but when it's offline, at least I can still play my games.

The problem is that they want to add this always-on draconian DRM, and using "enhancements as mandatory" to justify it. YES, provide cool online enhancements, and sure, require always-on DRM to use those online enhancements, but there is not a single enhancement in that group that justifies making it mandatory for playing it single player.

Not even "preventing cheating" is a good enough reason to remove all ability at single player offline play. I'm not playing with anyone else after all.

Re:It seems good

[c1t1z3nk41n3]

And this right here is what it really boils down to. It's not so much about piracy of the game itself as maintaining the artificial scarcity of in game items. If you can just clone the awesome sword, you certainly won't be buying it for real world cash and Blizzard won't be getting their cut.

Re:It seems good

[bistromath007]

They won't be denied that ability. All these games with "always-on" DRM wind up with server emulators in pretty short order. For the people that NEED to play offline, the option will be available within a month of release, if not before it. For everyone that actually has a decent connection, this is pointless griping. There are many games where this would be nothing more than anti-consumer encroachment, but anyone who both played Diablo II and had any sense realized that there was absolutely no reason to play offline in the first place. Even if you always played alone, forever, and had no interest whatsoever in trading (which I can't really fathom once you need just one more piece of that awesome set you've been collecting) playing an offline character was dumb since it cut you off from the best items in the game.

To understand how much the playerbase is kneejerking here, take a look at the other thing they're so massively butthurt about: the cash auctions. Once again, if you played Diablo II and had any sense, you've always wanted this and found it senseless that Blizzard never put it in. With this sort of game there will be a real-money economy, and if it's not dev-supported, it will be a nest of vipers that damages the experience for people who have nothing to do with it as well. If the actual implementation is anything like what they're claiming it will be, it's even the best support I've seen yet. Most devs just sell crap directly to the players, which makes the black market even more problematic. Furthermore, it pushes the devs to be senselessly jackbooted, because that market is now actively pressing on one of their revenue streams. With D3, it'll be players selling to players, so there won't be any need for any of this garbage, and there will be a way to get a real sense of how much things are worth, whether or not somebody wants to deal with the real money aspect.

Re:It seems good

[Moryath]

No, it died when those shitheaded SOB's at Activision bought Vivendi and created "Activision/Blizzard."

The "Always-On Requirement" is the kind of shit that comes out of the heads of the PHB-style suits who've been running franchise after franchise into the ground over at Activision.

As for "Who would want to play single player"? ME. I don't really care too much about the "multiplayer experience." I'll play the game on my own and that's fine.

Moving on up, you have people with ridiculously throttled connections. You have people who are living in remote locations who don't have consistent connections (a friend of mine is an oilfield services engineer, trust me, you don't get shit for a connection when you are out on a rig). You have people who are traveling on a laptop and don't have a free wi-fi connection nearby. You have servicemen and women in the armed forces. You have people who may have an "always-on" service but are in one of those fringe areas where TW, Cox, Comcast, etc don't give a crap about service and take weeks to repair any problems.

There are too many reasons NOT to do what Blizzard did and I hope they get a rude awakening at the sales counter. Every copy of Diablo 3 should have a 5-inch fucking sticker added to the front labeled with "NO SINGLE PLAYER. FUCK YOU. SIGNED BLIZZARD."

Re:It seems good

[snowgirl]

One nice thing about Morrowind is one of the first patches removed the DRM scheme that was in the game, replacing it with a simple CD check, because the DRM was causing problems. Props to Bethesda for that.

Props to Bethesda for releasing a broken game, and then removing the broken content when it looks like it might affect sales?

Let's all have a round of applause for the makers of lawn darts for taking it off the market when they realized that they were killing people...

Re:It seems good

[jitterman]

It's *because* of my always-on connection that I became a dirty pirate. Maps to treasure are everywhere!! :)

Re:It seems good

[Machtyn]

From the headline above, it sound like they *are* doing something besides keeping tabs on paying players. It sounds like they are keeping tabs on cheaters, dup'ers, and hacks. Since the single player character can also be used on battle.net, an always on connection to verify against hacks and dupes will keep the single player character synchronized and cheat free for the multiplayer experience.

Being the anti-social person that I am, I have no interest in meeting the thousands of anonymous "friends". I am quite definitely interested in the single player campaign almost exclusively. There may be times I will be at a LAN party and want to play that way... oh, wait, I can't do LAN only >:^(

While on vacation last week, I did bring my computer along. While chilling out in the evenings, I wanted to browse and play, but my Internet connection was terrible. When it worked, it was sufficient for web pages without any multimedia. This would definitely not be an environment for a like Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, or other similar games. I was very much looking forward to Diablo 3. Now I am very much looking forward to Torchlight 2 (I missed picking up the first one for a great price during the Steam Summer Sale).

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an even more pathetic excuse than "I want shit for free"

The game companies aren't offering a "100% satisfaction or your money back" guarantee here. Just because their game doesn't have exactly what you want, doesn't mean you can just walk away with it.

This isn't just selfishness, it's entitlement. Since when are people owed an offline capable D3 (or any other game)?

Re:It seems good

[Targon]

How many cellular dead spots do I run across during the day? Too many, far too many, with both Verizon and AT&T providing no service in many places. 3G...the big 66Kbps speeds we get in places...yea, that will work for gaming with 1200ms pings being the norm.

The real point is that single player does not require cheat protection to save us from others, and for those who have more of a life, playing the game for the sake of ENJOYING playing the game is more important than competing for some high score or level or whatever. It isn't the destination, it's the journey that should be fun. I don't care how great a story is if I hate playing the game.

Re:It seems good

[peragrin]

Diablo isnt a resource intensive game like WOW isnt any laptop made in the last 5 years should run it just fine.

Assuming a stable always on connection that will put users over their bandwidth caps is assinine. It isnt needed to play the game.

Re:It seems good

[Gwarsbane]

Its different because it shouldn't actually be required to have a connection that you always have to play for, month after month, just to play a game. Hell some people have really nasty bandwidth caps and every little byte counts towards it and don't want a game taking it up. Because they could easily do something slightly different and allow offline play which would not allow for trade of weapons and stuff, along with online play where they could trade stuff. Its easy enough to do. On gets saved and loaded to the local computer, the other only gets saved and loaded from the secure server. The game experience they want to give people would still be the same for people who are playing the single player, except for the fact that they could not sell their stuff, but if they were not going to do that anyway then there is no difference in game experience. Some people don't have constant connections, either because they can't get one, or because their connection keeps dropping and can't switch to a better provider. Requiring people to have a constant connection also stops people from playing while they are going to work, or traveling. You're sitting in a bus/car/plane/train/boat for a number of hours and want to play your game that you legally bought, but can't because even the single player requires a constant connection. You want to sit in the park for lunch and play for 20 or 30 minutes, but can't because there is no wireless. Or you are traveling for business and the hotel you are in doesn't have internet. And the biggest reason why people are pissed at them, is because its a game company telling them when and where they can or can't play their legally bought game. Imagine you needed an internet connection to use note pad? Or to watch a movie on your computer or dvd/blu-ray player? Or to browse your files on your computer? How would that make you feel? I bet you wouldn't care till you were working on something, and then your net connection goes offline for 10 seconds to a minute and you've lost everything you were working on. Or your connection started dropping every 5 to 10 minutes for what ever reason. Again, they could do the smart thing and easily include a way to play offline without compromising the online stuff. Its not that hard to do and they would sell far more games. Just make it knock that when you start a character, that they can either start it for offline play where they would not be able to trade anything but doesn't require a connection or can start one for online play which would allow trade, but would also require a constant connection. And allow them to have both so that if they want to do a little online stuff they can jump on, but if they are don't then they don't have to. Again the reason why people are pissed is because the game company is trying to tell them when and where they can play the game they legally bought.

Re:It seems good

[Squiddie]

The always-on thing is just a DRM scheme. It brings noting to the table so the requirement is not really required for the game but for the company. Yes, there is an online mode and that obviously means that you need an internet connection, but there is also a single player mode and that should not require my computer to be calling home. Why is it that when Ubisoft did this it was wrong but when Blizzard does it, it's okay? It's not okay and it's not okay to require such silly things from games. I won't be buying. They seem to not want my money.

Re:It seems good

[Gwarsbane]

Sorry about the block of text, I did have proper spacing, but didn't know they would not be included.

Re:It seems good

[Moryath]

It motivates people to get online and play within the economy and the world. You don't play MMO's as single player either, Blizzard has obviously designed the game more like an MMO than a traditional game. You don't complain about lack of single player in MMO games either, do you?

And my answer is: fuck you. I don't WANT to "get online and play within the economy."

I don't want to be online and have a bunch of 6-year-olds shouting "gay" and "fag" in my game. If I wanted to do that, I'd get on Xbox Live. Hell, even when I played City of Heroes I played mostly with the sound turned off and my stereo on in the background, and I only opened a chat channel long enough to look for a group. There was always some asshole on there, usually connected to a griefer guild set up by some weirdo named "Doheny", who was spewing nonstop profanity over their global chat channels anyways.

Diablo 3 is supposed to be a single-player game, according to the specs they put forth. A "single-player game" that requires me to be online for "the economy" is not a single-player game and they should be hit with false advertising charges.

Re:It seems good

[smelch]

Why shit in a toilet when a hole in the ground would suffice? Are you being serious right now? Because they're making a fucking game and they're making it the way they want to make it. Why is WoW online only? Why do racing games have time trials? Why did Quake II have single player modes? Becuase that's what the company decided to do.

Now on the other hand a good reason to do single player in Diablo 3 is because maybe you just don't want other people in the game. Characters at different points in the timeline might affect the presentation of the world. Shut up, nutsack.

Re:It seems good

[RivenAleem]

I can't help but feel a bit sympathetic towards people who feel they must fill every moment of their lives with computer gaming.

I am a long time WoW player, and I have never regretted any time spent as a passenger in a car/bus/train when I couldn't log in. So there's going to be times when you can't plug into Diablo III, big fucking deal.

So many of the comments in this, and other, stories are made purely to bemoan and cry about the evil DRM in games. This record is getting so old. Always online is in NO WAY going to affect MY ability to play, since I have my PC for playing, which has internet. When I'm not at my PC, I'm not playing, it's that simple.

There are books, magazines, music, video, *gasp* socialising & many many other things you can do with yourself (and others) when you are not connected to the internet.

This forum is, unfortunately, populated by so many of the same kind of person, the one that rallies against any form of DRM because they feel it violated their basic human rights.

I'm getting so tired of people here and their first world problems.

Re:It seems good

[Moryath]

Why not just connect your laptop to your smartphone by tethering to get a reliable connection and play?

No, you're just an asshole who's never tried to get a reliable connection out of a tethered phone anywhere but the center of a major city.

The reality is, the moment you are outside the 'OMG THEY MICROWAVE MY BRAIN' level downtown tower range, you're lucky to just get enough random connection bursts at lowest speed to receive the occasional email and text message.

Re:It seems good

[nfc_Death]

No they are offering a stunted hard to use product when the product can just as easily be offered and utilized without their stifling add-ons.
I believe that is the basis for copyright and trademark infringement according to economists the world over.
Although no one is owed a specifically tailored product to their needs, when a company releases a product that has the ability, with minor modification, to meet a greater majority of their consumers desires, that modification will occur and the knowledge of how to circumvent the limitations imposed by the above mentioned product developer will be disseminated among the rest of humanity.
'They stole our bits!' Is currently a motto that is destroying the US from the inside out. Get your shit together you brain-dead Americans, you're walling yourself in, and you already sold off all your abilities to self-sustain.

Re:It seems good

[GigaHurtsMyRobot]

Pretty ridiculous that TW business class is less reliable than a Comcast home connection...

Re:It seems good

[Machtyn]

Actually, I *do* believe Valve will provide patches if they were ever to shutdown. Of course, this does not likely extend to other properties sold on Steam. Still, Valve has proven its love for their customers in many ways. Blizzard, too, has proven its love ... except now they are "Blizzavision", and anything from Activision automatically gains the "I'm wary of you" skepticism.

Re:It seems good

[crow_t_robot]

I see the words "fair" and "wrong" being thrown around in these replies too much. Blizzard can do whatever they want to do regarding always-on DRM. If you don't like it or the DRM scheme doesn't match your connection requirements then DON'T BUY IT. If more people do this then it won't be profitable to implement these schemes and the companies WILL STOP doing this. If you don't like it and Blizzard is making enough money that makes them happy from the sales that are occurring then TOO BAD. You do not have a "god-given" right to play MMO games offline.

Re:It seems good

[RKThoadan]

Those people have the option to upgrade their PCs. Many people do not have any options which provide a stable always-on connection.

I can understand their reasoning. I don't agree with it, but it's their choice and their right to limit their audience if they choose to.

I'll admit I'm somewhat biased in that I'm just not that interested in D3.

Re:It seems good

[Machtyn]

so it is arguable a sane consumer choice to start with pirating.

I wouldn't say that is the starting point. The starting point is purchase the game, install it, patch up to the latest crack, install the crack, play worry free. Granted, that's not really pirating, now is it? What it is, is removing the bugs shipped from the mfg.

Re:It seems good

[Vanderhoth]

Just to note a couple of differences.

I buy a computer or upgrade a part for a computer once and won't be billed extra depending on how much I use it.

There's a debated going on right now in Canada whether usage based billing should be allowed or not. If it's allowed, we might see cases where ISPs will start charging extra for services like Netflix or playing an online game like WoW. I personally don't like the idea of having to pay my ISP extra so I can use a service I've already payed for, especially when the service is a game I've already bought and can play a single player version of.

I pay for my internet connection every month, but if it came down to it and I wanted to save a little money I might have it disconnected. Which would mean I'd no longer be able to play any single player games I've bought that require an "always on" connection.

One more difference is even though I have DSL internet, there are times where it goes down. I had to call my ISP three times last month alone because of some mysterious issue. Funny how the connection breaks and after spending 20 minutes on hold and 10 minutes answer questions, the issue resolves itself as soon as the customer service rep says, "Oh, I don't see a problem on our end.". My Hard drive, graphics card and other PC parts seem to work more consistently.

Re:It seems good

[The Moof]

tethering to get a reliable connection

I'm sure my phone company, with their overly restrictive and discouraging views of tethering devices, would *love* that. Not to mention that a phone's connection isn't exactly what I'd call reliable.

Hiccup in the network? BOOM, progress lost, and you've been kicked out of the game, you dirty, dirty pirate!

Re:It seems good

[nahdude812]

This is part of the problem, but not the entire problem. What I do with my personal game time is my own business, and the game company has no business trying to set up requirements surrounding that. They shouldn't get to know when I'm playing and when I'm not, that's information I own and which they have no right to.

But most importantly in 5 or 10 years, when their online presence servers have gone away and my game no longer works at all, they shouldn't be allowed to have thus deprived me of something I paid for. I still play Diablo II and StarCraft to this day.

I understand the stated reasons for the always-on requirement, and I agree that there's some value to it. But let me choose whether I want to participate in that value or not. Let me play single player offline, and let that character be unavailable for online play since it's an offline-only character. Maybe I choose to play single player online so that I can use that character for multiplayer and everyone can be assured there's no cheating involved. Maybe I don't. The choice should be mine, not theirs.

Re:It seems good

[nfc_Death]

Actually this is a developing nation problem more than a developed nation problem. The decisions we make in our developed nations will assist in the direction the developing nations will choose for their products.
I believe ACTA is an excellent example of this. By requiring member nations to get on board with the over-bearing repressive style of patent, trademark, and copyright litigation and regulation we have effectively stunted their ability to produce.
By opening these developing nations up to possible reprisals from developed nation based multi-nationals you have threatened with the stick but not offered a carrot at all.
"This forum is, unfortunately, populated by so many of the same kind of person, the one that rallies against any form of DRM because they feel it violated their basic human rights."
I'm confused as to where this comment puts you? Are you stating you have no vigilance whatsoever when it comes to human rights? Or are you stating this doesn't fall under human rights and should be ignored? Since I have yet to see a comment besides yours mentioning human rights so far in this thread, your statement is even more confusing.
The people here are rallying against having their ability to enjoy their entertainment hampered by questionable business practices and possible collusion between businesses.

Re:It seems good

[metalgamer84]

Agreed. I love playing single-player campaigns. I do not play with others online nor do I want to. D3 just dropped off my list of games to buy unless this always-connected requirement gets dropped.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

did you played anything in your life ?? "fun gaming experience" ??? can you explain what you think it means ?

i'm a videogame programmer, and i know exactly when they say things for stupid people who like to act like they understand what they mean.

Re:It seems good

[nfc_Death]

LOL, so angry! Except you fail to make a single point in your comment.
I don't poop in the ground because I have a toilet. If you advertise you have a toilet but then require people to have a subscription to toilets monthly to use the toilet well then you're not offering a toilet at all are you?
WoW is online online because it is designed that way.
Racing games have time trials so you can compete against yourself.
Quake II had single player modes because of the state of internet connections and gaming in general.
This company decided to make a single-player offering into a stunted MMO, but still wants the single-player moniker attached.
'Shut up, nutsack.'
It's obvious I just wasted my typing on you, but others find intelligent debate meaningful to read, and enjoy the opinions and concerns of others.
Go read a book, child.

Re:It seems good

[elrous0]

those shitheaded SOB's at Activision

Oh, come on, you didn't like Pitfall? Everyone liked Pitfall.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Also one thing to consider in many public places the connection is firewalled and many gaming ports are blocked. Is this service going to run on port 80? If not you may not be able to play.

Re:It seems good

[Phaid]

Morrowind and Oblivion both work fine with Virtual CloneDrive. That way you can play without a physical CD, and without requiring a no-CD patch (which break stuff like Morrowind FPS Optimizer and Oblivion Script Extender).

Re:It seems good

[heathen_01]

AC hits the nail on the head again. How is blizzard going to get their cut if you can just mod your offline game instead of buying from their exchange?

Re:It seems good

[elrous0]

I would like to believe that if the day comes that they stop supporting Diablo 3 that they may release a set of patches that would remove the DRM

Yeah, because when a studio enters bankruptcy, gets new management, or is sold, their #1 priority is to hire a bunch of programmers to patch their ancient games.

Re:It seems good

[heathen_01]

Follow the money. How will they capture a recurring income stream without forcing always online play? DRM is possibly just an added bonus.

Re:It seems good

[RivenAleem]

The comment regarding human rights, is not based solely on this article. It is my opinion that whenever the subject of DRM comes up, the knee-jerk reaction of the /. community is "DRM IS EVIL, Boycott the Publisher"

I don't know if you played as much Diablo 2 as I did, but there are surely some who might remember a time where they lost an item, intended for trade, because the other person was using a speed hack to run over, pick up they item you were trading, and back to pick up their own before you could reach the item you were trading for.

This "DRM" is intended to ensure that all players in an online game are playing within the rules. The Auction House is there to ensure fair trade of items. Considering that people here would never dream of pirating a game, then I would have assumed that they would be happy that Blizzard are trying this method to curb cheating. Aren't we all technical enough to have Internet 90% of the time? I have it wherever I would consider playing games. When I'm not online (travelling somewhere) I have alternative methods of passing the time.

I'm not a Blizzard (or Ubisoft) employee, I just feel that people really make a major drama over constant connection restrictions. I know that when it's a case like Assassins creed or whatever, that has absolutely no multiplayer function, then the connection requirement is a hindrance. But I think that it will be a net benefit for players of Diablo III.

Re:It seems good

[DaFallus]

Why should most people suffer a shitty gaming experience just because a small percentage will pirate the game or cheat? There are plenty of other ways for people to make games that sell well without fucking everyone over in a paranoid and greedy attempt to exert total control over your product.

I was really looking forward to Diablo 3. Because of this, I'm not going to be buying it, or pirating it, and I'm fairly sure I'm going to pass on the next two Starcraft releases as well. Instead, I'll probably end up buying Torchlight 2.

Are you also the type of person who thinks the TSA groping people at the airport is cool, so long as it reduces the potential for YOU to be harmed by a terrorist by 0.000000001%?

Re:It seems good

[silentcoder]

>Being the anti-social person that I am, I have no interest in meeting the thousands of anonymous "friends"

Actually there's more to it than that. This ties in directly with their decision to offer a real-money auction house. If you don't do everything in your power to prevent cheating - then that auction house will be rife with fraud, people posting a billion duped items etc. - which would massively devalue it for all players and make it unattractive to use.

Done right, once the initial rush is sated, I see no reason why somebody who enjoys gaming to the point of grinding at "job" levels couldn't make a moderate living off of playing and selling on said AH. But that possibility basically requires them making every effort to prevent cheating.
I'm not sure the always-on will really help though. WoW is always on, and they have basically shut down cheaters by now, there's hardly any cheating left. Yet gold-sellers and farmers still exist, only now they steal other people's account details to get the content of those people's characters, convert that to gold and sell it. Basically they couldn't effectively bot-farm anymore, so now they let the good players farm for them (crowdsourcing ?) and just steal the results.

I haven't seen anything yet in d3 that will suddenly stop THAT !

Re:It seems good

[elrous0]

Don't worry, by then we'll be too busy driving dune buggies and fighting mohawk-wearing mutants for gasoline to worry about videogames. And I, for one, welcome our new Humungus overlord.

Re:It seems good

[charlieman]

If the humble bundle has teach me something, it is that 20% of the market of game buyers are Linux users.

I don't think these companies should be ignoring 20% of potential buyers, specially when the work to make it run in Linux is already half done for the Mac.

Re:It seems good

[madhatter256]

Sure, there are some situations where you cannot connect to internet, but it's really in minority.

You probably wouldn't say that if you lived in a remote location. For some people connecting to the internet means driving to a wifi-enabled cafe or buying a satellite connection, i.e. the majority of situations they can't connect.

If you're Ted Kizinski.... oh please. The only ones complaining are those who like to complain... you'll still buy the damn game and play it.

The target market is the PC Gamer... And 99.1% of them have a constant internet connection.... If you don't have an "always-on" internet connection then you probably aren't the target market for this game...

Get over yourselves.

Re:It seems good

[ildon]

And those people won't buy Diablo 3, or will rely on some hack to play it. And they're an extreme minority. At some point you have to just cut the super edge cases off.

Re:It seems good

[crow_t_robot]

How about servicemen in afgahnistan?

How about them? They also don't having access to Six Flags Cedar Pointe while they are there either. Should we shit ourselves with rage that Six Flags isn't relocating one of their amusement parks so that the troops can exercise their god-given rights to being able to attend an amusement park while deployed? I mean, they have this god-given RIGHT to play so stupid fucking video game made by Blizzard, right??? Oh wait.. Bottom line: bad/no internet connection? this game is not for you.

Re:It seems good

[B'Trey]

Because of the things blizzard is doing this move is needed to help stave of some serious issue that can arise with RMT. I think they are bold for doing this and it makes sense why they would. In this iteration of the series SP has taken a backseat, especially given the popularity of MP in D2.

No, it doesn't make sense. I can respect the desire to avoid cheating and to emphasize solid MP gameplay. But from a technical perspective, how hard would it be to give you a choice of local or server storage for your character at the beginning of a single player game? If you choose server storage, you need an Internet connection and you can use that character in online games. If you choose local storage, no connection required but that character can only be used for single-player games.

If you don't like it, don't buy it. It is not aimed at those who have trouble with the internet. Your troubles with the internet does not supersede the design and direction of the game.

Of course I have the option of not buying it. I also have the option of bitching about a stupid requirement to play a game. My bitching is not aimed at players who see no problem with the requirement. It's aimed at Blizzard, to let them know why I won't be a customer for this game. Your irritation with my bitching doesn't supersede my right to bitch or to let Blizzard know that they have potential customers who are not actual customers because of this decision. If you don't like my bitching, don't read/listen to it.

For what it's worth, my perspective is influenced by serving twenty years in the US Navy. When you're stuck for six months on a ship at sea with no personal Internet connection possible, games become a great way to pass the time. As more and more games make an Internet connection a requirement for playing even single player games, it'll soon get to the point where you aren't choosing to not purchase a particular game but are being forced to give up gaming entirely.

Re:It seems good

[madhatter256]

I live in a mid sized city in new york state. My time warner cable connection drops randomly, several times a week, forcing me to reload and reenter things like forms(slashdot posts). It is saturatedand Time warner is cheap. I dont have an always on connection so now i cant play diablo III except for early in the morning.

Cable connectioms across the country arent stable enough leaving 100 million potentioal users in the dirt.

How about servicemen in afgahnistan? Or on deployment on ships? They cant play it either. They cant even play Starcraft againist each other in their down time.

Assuming an always on connection is always wrong.

Oh please.... Don't use the military as an example

Have you been in Baghram airforce base? It's the only place troops can have decent R&R as the rest of the country is a battlefield.

These navy ships and bases are technology powerhouses. They have constant internet access, constant satellite connection, etc.

Chances are they won't play those games as it can be too distracting to our troops... but still. Using the military as an example is laughable and only valid if you're talking about the old military, before WW1...

Re:It seems good

[loufoque]

I am a long time WoW player, and I have never regretted any time spent as a passenger in a car/bus/train when I couldn't log in. So there's going to be times when you can't plug into Diablo III, big fucking deal.

What if you're moving for business reasons, and you're in a crappy motel and you want to play a bit in the evening to relax a bit?
What if you're taking a 10 hours+ trip and you want to pass the time?
What if you're a student on a campus or in a boarding school without Internet connectivity?

You might as well require an internet connection to read books.

Re:It seems good

[ildon]

Most Valve employees are the type of people who would do this on their own time for free if the company went under.

Re:It seems good

[Kharny]

wow, all of 5 euro per month for a basic 3G connection 512/256k, horribly expensive that.

If you are in a foreign country, how about shutting the damn laptop and actually seeing the place?

Re:It seems good

[loufoque]

the knee-jerk reaction of the /. community is "DRM IS EVIL, Boycott the Publisher"

It's not a political opinion, it's a well-established fact.
Well, "evil" is not a fact, but "hurts legitimate users without even being able to prevent pirating" is one.

No DRM system can work -- it's just not possible from a technical point of view. All it can do is delay the inevitable.

Re:It seems good

[Machtyn]

A core gamer: Starcraft 1, off-line single player, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, HL2:Ep1-2, off-line single player (yes, I know you have to register with Steam, but that's a one time connection to then say "Start offline"), The Elder Scroll Series (single-player only), NeverWinter Nights (more fun with friends, but Internet connection not needed), Need for Speed series has an online component, but not needed, name your sports franchise here, name your sim franchise here (sims ranging the gamut from The Sims 1 to Sim City to Roller-Coaster Typhoon, etc).

Oh, and guess what, they did beg for a single player edition of Counter-Strike... and we got it. Okay, beg is a strong word. When Valve acquired the CS mod team, then released the game for actual cash, they included a fairly extensive single player game to train the player so they wouldn't get wiped when they got online. The player could learn some tactics and the weapons of the game. Even still, CS (and TF2) can be played on a LAN without an Internet connection.

You are right, no one begged for WoW offline, but Diablo 3 isn't an MMO, now is it?

Re:It seems good

[snowgirl]

Follow the money. How will they capture a recurring income stream without forcing always online play? DRM is possibly just an added bonus.

Well, I think the thing is two parts, convincing people to always play online producing the recurring income stream, while DRM creates a mandatory online play. (Playing "single player" that can be taken online and back readily is playing solo in a multiplayer game, not actual single player gaming.)

So, yeah, it's all about directing them towards revenue streams, it's just about coaxing them to come by providing benefits (chatting with friends, you can keep in touch, easy linking up and co-op play, etc and forcing them into it (DRM). But I don't see one or the either as being a secret way to get people to the other.

Re:It seems good

[pcolaman]

These navy ships actually have pretty piss poor internet connections, despite the technology. My brother-in-law is a SAR pilot for the Navy, and the boat he was on had internet that was capable of slow connections for email and some browsing. No way in hell it would support internet gaming such as Diablo 3. Most of the technology is reserved for war fighting, you make it seem like they are on a floating internet cafe. Hell, their phone connection is even pretty piss poor, dropping, echoing, and with severe delays sometimes (as much as a few seconds sometimes).

Re:It seems good

[space_jake]

Seriously, my money is going to the ex-Blizzard guys that still give people want they want. Torchlight 2 and Guild Wars 2 hoooo!

Re:It seems good

[Dishevel]

The reason for online connectivity while in SP is DRM. Not features. Why try to stop someone from cheating in SP? Who gives a fuck.
Pound hard on cheaters that are online in MP. But the always connected need for SP play is simply a removal of features in order to make it harder for copyright infringers.

Of course those people will be able to work around this.

Only the people who pay for the game will be punished.

Re:It seems good

[tbannist]

I think Blizzard's quality decline began shortly after Vivendi purchased it, that's when most of the Blizzard talent left to pursue other opportunities. As I understand it, at that time many of the original Warcraft and World of Warcraft developers left to work on Guild Wars. In this case, Activision is "only" raping the corpse and stealing it's gold fillings.

Re:It seems good

[Hott of the World]

Yes, all the security of a MMO without any of the monthly new content that paying $15 a month provides. Instead I get the luxury of an Auction house that uses real money and a PVP system that relies on Gear bought with real money.

If Diablo 3 was "Guild Wars" in the Diablo universe, I might reconsider. They have no incentive or responsibility to update or provide new content. And rest assured, even if they do go out of their way to update or provide content, they will not do so indefinitely. We can expect the authentication to be indefinite, however.

Personally, I don't think you should be worried about all the people who aren't going to buy it. The crackers of the world are quite adept at adapting to these petty game design choices, and just about anyone can run a private WOW server to play their game on. Diablo 3 wont stand a chance against pirates. Never would, really.

Re:It seems good

[x6060]

It is still kind of crappy. A lot of my guys play video games while on deployment. Its a great way to waste time in a shitty place. I know a few of them would probably play Diablo 3 if given the chance, however deployments can last 1-2 years.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

That's mighty optimistic and naive of you. Pray tell, how this would work?

They would have to patch every single game. Said patches would have to be tested and distributed. That alone would be a massive undertaking. At a time Valve would be closing up shop that's a lot of additional expense they could not justify. Not to mention that at the same time, people who relied on "oh I can redownload any time I want" will start to hurriedly redownload ALL their games to back them up before Valve will be gone.

No way that is going to happen at a time when the company would already be in trouble. It's an economical and logistical impossibility.

Re:It seems good

[Meneth]

I really don't understand all the hoo-ha - maybe the people who don't have a reliable net connection should buy one of the MYRIAD of competing products which don't have that requirement?

There is no competing product for sale. Blizzard has a monopoly on Diablo 3. Other games in the same genre are not going to be nearly as good.

Fortunately, the pirate option remains.

Re:It seems good

[IICV]

For the small trade-off you get cheat-free economy and you can play both single-player and multiplayer with the same characters.

Cheat-free economy? I think you mean "cheat-legalized" economy.

Paying cash for items is not allowed in Diablo 2. Diablo 3 is going to have a real cash auction house, where you can essentially buy power (with Blizzard taking a cut at every step of the process).

Re:It seems good

[bdenton42]

The comparision may be more valid than you think.

MS has been pushing that "Live" thing in Win7. I don't think it would be much of a stretch at all for them to decide in Win8 or Win9 to require you to always have an internet connection so you can login to Windows using a "Live" account, for exactly the same reasons D3 requires it for single player mode: identity, DRM, security and updates.

Re:It seems good

[kelemvor4]

Sure, there are some situations where you cannot connect to internet, but it's really in minority.

You probably wouldn't say that if you loved in a remote location.

I loved a woman on the northern tip of cape cod once. I don't think I even checked to see if there was internet there.

Re:It seems good

[Sniper98G]

How much further would you take it - if the next generation of Windows required to be on line would it be fair to remove their computers?

Even Microsoft can't just come around and remove your computer. If they wanted to forego sales to people who don't have internet though then there would be nothing wrong with that; you'd just have to use a different OS.

Yes, you would need to use a differant OS, or in this case play a differant game. That is the point of the above coment. You would not buy an operation system that would not let you use your computer when not online, why should you fork out your cash for a game that behaves like that.

Re:It seems good

[KingMotley]

LOL @ The bandwidth cap.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't need to, really. There's a lot of charitable organizations doing that good work for free! Here's a list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_warez_groups

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! Even with a satellite connection I still have download limits 7.5GB on a rolling 30 day cycle. I tried Half Life 2 but because Steam demands you update the game at installation the 1GB+ of updates at install took 2 days before I could play it! Now I have to use bandwidth just to play!? Yeah Fuck you too blizzard. I'm a believer in supporting the creators of music and game (and even their suits), but if they won't sell me a product I can use their out of luck. I love Diablo too much not to play so it looks like the Pirate copy is the one for me.

Re:It seems good

[Gaygirlie]

Go e.g. farm mineral veins in Twilight Highlands: sooner or later you're bound to meet a bot who flies around under the ground and grabs the veins in front of you and you can't even target him for more than a few seconds. Mine point is: Warden doesn't work, there's plenty of cheats and hacks around that work just fine even after several years of being available.

Re:It seems good

[Chruisan]

You would not buy an operation system that would not let you use your computer when not online

I don't know much about it, but isn't that the basis of Google's Chrome OS?

Re:It seems good

[grumbel]

For the small trade-off you get cheat-free economy and you can play both single-player and multiplayer with the same characters.

It's not a trade-off and trying to dress it as one is nothing but a marketing lie. Forcing online play is simply about removing offline play, it doesn't improve online play one bit as nothing would stop them from offering offline play and online play and simply disallowing you to switch characters between both modes.

Re:It seems good

[rbrausse]

purchase the game, install it, patch up to the latest crack, install the crack, play worry free

I did it this way. and stopped buying games - too much hassle. I'm too lazy to fix broken proprietary software, why should I invest time after I just paid 40EUR?

I was never one of the hardcore gamers so probably the software industry don't needs me as customer; but they lose selling opportunities. if I need some hours of senseless gaming I use my 8+ year old purchased games or opensource software (like UFO:AI or Widelands) - those are enough.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

actually windows 8 is supposed to be very cloud friendly....

Re:It seems good

[bdenton42]

I don' t think Linux is anywhere near 20% of game buyers.

I've never heard of the Humble Bundle before, so perhaps it is just more well known in the Linux community due to it's support of it, so it just has a disproportionate number of Linux users.

But thanks for the pointer, I'll check them out. Maybe it will inspire me to try Linux again.

Re:It seems good

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

As someone that has worked for 10 years at a software company whose software is supported on Linux, I agree wholeheartedly that troubleshooting Linux issues can be a PITA for this very reason. If I investigate an issue and determine the problem the user experienced is a library version incompatibility they haven't always been very happy.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

why would you be playing diablo 3 on the move? its not like you can be walking around the park going through catacombs lol. DRM really isn't a problem for the target market of the game, so all the people that are complaining, blizzard is wiping their tears with everyone elses money who buys the game lol.

Re:It seems good

[sesshomaru]

"Do you really believe that the online and "MMO-like" elements of Diablo 3 were added first or do you think they added them strictly because they're looking for a way to add DRM?"

I figure they're adding them to monetize their players into an additional revenue stream through real money online auction houses.

I won't be participating of course, it sounds like a painful and horrible experience, and for that I have real life.

Re:It seems good

[Dan667]

so Blizzard hates and will not support the Troops.

Re:It seems good

[Pendaelose]

I've been to Balad, Warhorse, Falcon, Stryker, Victory, Caldwell, BIAP, Tallil, Cobra (1&2, for those few who remember the original), plus Arifjan, Wolf, and Doha in Kuwait. Most of my time was spent at Warhorse, a dirt bowl with an intermittent internet connection that struggled to even support IM chat. I'm a life long PC gamer, and I spent 4 years in Iraq. When you live in a location with limited or no internet connectivity and have massive amounts of free time games are a great escape from a miserable environment. It's not an obligation of the publishers to provide games they can play, but it sure does make life a lot more comfortable. Here's the catch. I mail ordered a half dozen games from amazon (40-60$ each) and couldn't play any of them because of online DRM requirements, STEAM, and other mandatory log-ins etc. However, I could walk down the to local shops and buy a Pirate version of the game for 5$ and it worked just fine. How many times do you think I sent my money to a retailer before I figured decided it wasn't worth the effort of trying. I was an IT contractor in a combat zone so I had plenty of disposable income and I would have preferred to play the legit game. I was willing to spend the money to make it happen, but excessive DRM made the games unplayable. My issue with DRM goes beyond the deployments though. Many of my favorite games were win95-winXP. While the game can play just fine on Vista/7 the DRM isn't compatible anymore. I have books of CDs with old games I purchased, but I have to download pirate copies to play them. When excess DRM only punishes legitimate customers there is a problem in the industry.

Re:It seems good

[FingerSoup]

If so, why would you want to use it then? If my internet connection goes down, I lose my ability to work? screw that... Why do you think people aren't switching in droves to ChromeOS from Win/Mac/Linux? because it relies too heavily on Web access.. Probably not to the extent you mention, but I choose to keep some things out of the cloud...

Re:It seems good

[Inda]

I don't understand the issue.

I don't have a gazillion dollars and I fly planes for a hobby. I don't have a PS3 and I can't play Gran Turismo 5...

You don't have a reliable net connection and you can't play Diablo 3. It's as simple as that.

For me, I do have a reliable net connection. I think it dropped out in 2008 for an hour but, hey, no problem.

Re:It seems good

[AngryDeuce]

I don't think it would be much of a stretch at all for them to decide in Win8 or Win9 to require you to always have an internet connection so you can login to Windows using a "Live" account, for exactly the same reasons D3 requires it for single player mode: identity, DRM, security and updates.

I honestly doubt that, if only because of the greed aspect, as requiring an internet connection *period* would eliminate a lot of potential customers. WiFi connectivity is far from ubiquitous in 80% of the country, and worldwide I'd bet it's even lower.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

80 years is a LONG way off for people and is the extreme scifi future for technology. Most people here will be dead. The games of which you speak will likely be unplayable UNLESS they are code ported all that time or specific emulators exist. Maybe NetHack will still be around. It is the only one I have heard of that has lasted for even a quarter of the time you mention.

The DVDs and CDs the games are on may not be readable either by media damage or that there are no working DVD/CD readers available. Crazy? Where's your 3.5 inch flopy drive? 5.25 inch? 8 inch? I thought so. That technology is only 40 years old and it is gone. Sure, you can copy the files forward onto modern storage like flash drives, but eventually you will find that the current OSs cannot play your original game. Yes you can download old games and play them, but they have been ported. Your original binaries won't work.

The idea that we can buy a game and be able to play it forever is flawed. Equipment will break and be unrepairable/unreplaceable. OSs march into the future and leave old binaries obsolete. It takes time and money to keep a game playable into the future and eventually the porting will cease. Our games will be gone forever.

Re:It seems good

[Jibekn]

The problem, is that is you read into what exactally blizzard is doing, its NOT just always on DRM, its a server/client style of game with no offline component. The drops, mob spawns, charecter storage, etc, is all done server side, even in the 'single player'. So no, a server emulator will not be quickly forthcoming. And when it does arrive, it will be on par with the WoW server emulators(crap).

Re:It seems good

[Cimexus]

"Square-Enix was notorious for doing that with Final Fantasy XI; the maintenance cycle always fell during Japanese off-hours (since they are a Japanese company and all) so when they'd turn the servers off in the middle of the night there us North American players would get the shaft in our prime time."

Hehe ... welcome to the experience of gamers in Australia and New Zealand in basically every MMO in existence. Maintenance falls at some time in the early hours US time (say, 4am). Which is smack bang in Australian/NZ prime time. Australia/NZ isn't a big enough market to bother hosting local servers for, so we just get the same boxed US-region game as the US does, and connect to US-hosted servers (unlike our northern neighbours in Asia, who have a much larger population and hence local servers). Actually FFXI is actually one of the few where this problem doesn't affect us because Japan and Australia are only between 0 and 3 hours apart, depending on which area of Australia and what time of year it is.

Re:It seems good

[srmalloy]

Based on conversations I've had with the developers from NCSoft, it has nothing to do with the game as DRM, and everything to do with the market, and the way that Blizzard has chosen to implement the protection is straight out of the MMO developer's bible -- "don't trust the client". Anything stored in the client can and will be hacked by end users, so in any game where a character's stats advance or there can be an exchange of in-game items for in-game or real currency, any changes to a character or their inventory have to be stored on the central server, where the end user's can't open up the data files on their local computer and dupe a dozen copies of the epic weapon that they were lucky enough to get in a drop, or grovel through the game data for item indexes and give themselves one of every top-tier item in the game.

In a stand-alone game, the user can hack the game to their heart's content, and it doesn't affect anyone else; having your friend next door hack his copy of "ForeverQuest" so that he's got the best armor and weapons doesn't change the game for you. Having someone be able to hack the copy of Diablo 3 on their PC, then sell a million copies of the best armor and weapons on the market screws with everyone's game. So stat and inventory data have to reside on a central server. And because a player's stats and inventory can be hacked while the game is running, you can't just get a download from the server when you open the game, then play the game offline and send any changes back up to the server at the end of your session; there has to be an ongoing dialog between the server and the client to make sure that you're not fabbing gear out of nowhere. Now, Blizzard could have set up offline play as a sandbox -- you get the download of your character's stats and gear when you start up, then you play without needing an active connection, but nothing that happens to your character persists past that session; when you start up the game again, your character gets downloaded from the server again, and your entire offline session was just a dream. But I don't think that's going to be acceptable to players.

A requirement for an always-on connection may be annoying to most, and deal-breaking for some, but it's the only way that having an online market for items is going to be able to work unless you're willing to surrender a lot of control over your computer to 'big brother' processes that ensure that you don't modify local data files -- and how many separate rootkits are you willing to put up with just to not have an internet connection live when you play your market-enabled games?

Re:It seems good

[garatheus]

I don't even live in a remote location, but a bustling city (Johannesburg). The problem is, our Internet is just so damn expensive, and most of us have to "cheap out" on the cheapest line rental for the slowest line speed (384kbps) in order to get our dose of the Internet at home. All this for the low low price (converted) of R369 [around $56?] with a 1GB international cap.

So now, to play the single player game, where my connection is already so damn slow, am I going to be booted out of the game every couple of minutes because I can't connect to the servers properly, because latency is an issue, or I have someone else connected to my router at home, trying to browse to a page (and trust me, these big sites take forever to load).

Yeah, on a good day I can consume around 2GB of data - but its all another expense (uncapped at another R200, again for the slowest line speed of 384kbps). So in the end, we already pay ~R568 for a sh*tty 384kbps line.

Definitely something I won't be investing money into (and by that, I don't mean I will pirate it, because I actually do buy games I enjoy).

In other news, I think From Dust is going to have stupid "always online" to play (according to www.impulsedriven.com - and surprisingly enough, not www.steampowered.com), and I just bought that (preorder), so perhaps I'll have a benchmark for this "always online" DRM these publishers are forcing, fist first, down our throats.

Re:It seems good

[B'Trey]

so Blizzard hates and will not support the Troops.

Of course that isn't true, and screaming "But you have to think of the chil^H^H^H^H troops!!!" wasn't the point I was making. I pointed out one particular reason that I personally have been without access to an individual Internet connection for extended periods. There are many other reasons why people don't always have access to a permanent connection.

I suspect, but don't know, that part of the justification for this requirement is anti-piracy, although Blizzard appears not be making that claim publicly. What Blizzard actually thinks is likely either that the small loss of revenue will be worth the benefits provided by the requirements, or that the loss from users not buying the game due to the requirement will be equaled or exceeded by additional sales driven by the anti-piracy measures. If the requirement is indeed solely about protecting the online experience, I pointed out a simple solution to that issue. If it's about anti-piracy, then obviously that solution is irrelevant.

Re:It seems good

[NEW22]

"There is no competing product for sale"... talk about a sad 1st world problem. Umm, Torchlight was developed by co-designers of Diablo I and II. Torchlight II is coming out this year. But I see you already have a story in your head justifying pirating a popular game, because that's probably what you wanted to do regardless. Pretty classy.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in a location with no internet and it sucks hard. It is AT&T's fault mostly because when we called on internet before we moved the sales guy said it was there and could be hooked up in a couple weeks in the latest a month due to expanding the service down our road. One year after we moved in still no internet and AT&T has no comment.

So when I purchased Starcraft 2 to play single player due to lack of internet imagine my anger and surprise saying I needed to connect up to the internet just to install the game. I had to get tethering on my Iphone (either through jailbreaking or legit) just to install the game and be online to play it. My offline profile never worked oddly enough, so I had to connect up with my 2-3 bar 3g connection and download updates and what not. This annoyed the piss out of me because I was just playing single player. I tried multiplayer with 3G and found it barely used any data and worked fine besides the occasional lag spike. Now with the release of Diablo III doing something similar but more online oriented I cringe a bit thinking of the slow load times for web content or downloads for patches and going above my data limit or getting throttled. To be honest if I lived with a cable internet connection I couldn't care less but its those of us with out a land-line internet connection at the mercy of paying more for less just to play a game if we are even able to. But we are the minority in a wave of blizzard fans and they wont care for years until the game dies down and they release a patch to remove the DRM.

Re:It seems good

[surferx0]

So the time we get to play the game DRM free is around about the time everyone else loses interest and the community has pretty much moved on? I'll pass.

Well yeah...isn't your entire point of DRM removal so that you are not restricted from playing the game many years later on in life? Whether or not the community is still alive at that point is up to the players to decide for themselves.

Re:It seems good

[Jibekn]

This is exactaly how its going to work, this is NOT an always online DRM, this is a WoW Style Server/Client game, There will be no pirate version, no more than there is a pirate version of WoW, and yes the EMU Servers are garbage, show me one that is an exact replica of a blizzard server. There was one that got close, and they got lawyer bombed into oblivion.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

The pirate copy will likely not require Internet at all, so only legitimate users will hurt from this.

The reason the game requires internet is so you can move single player characters to the multiplayer seamlessly and have a guarantee of no cheats or hacks. The character data is stored in the cloud, not on the local disk. So yes, if a pirated version is ever possible it will require an internet connection.

Re:It seems good

[AngryDeuce]

I still don't understand why they can't set up local servers. I mean, you can do everything via remote, and these companies still usually maintain a locally based customer service number (they did here, anyway, they were in California) so how hard would it be to merge the two? S-E just really amazed me with the depth of their obstinance as regards modern gaming conventions. It took them 4 freaking years to deliver a windowed mode on the PC for Christ's sake, not to mention just as long to deal with the rampant gil-selling that inflated the economy into the stratosphere and the fish bots and NM monopolization. They scored a home run on the game mechanics but failed horribly in execution. My two cents, anyway.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

That was pre activision

Re:It seems good

[Squiddie]

Or they could just give you the option to play offline and not take that character online. Many games have done this in the past. So I don't see the problem. I guess the problem is that Blizzard really loves money, and as you said, it's all about taking that cut from their RMT scheme.

Re:It seems good

[Jibekn]

Fooling warden is no more difficult than getting a child to buy into a slight of hand coin behind the ear trick, or pulling your thumb off trick. I personally ran a glider bot with some movment hacks from level 1-85, did 0 quests, and was only banned when reported by another user(myself, it was acedemic)

So yeah, always online doesnt prevent cheating, it never has.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Having a lag of 300ms in a heated battle may mean the difference between you laying on the ground with your chest open and you going on your way cheering. Especially if the synchronization protocol is not very well designed (I am looking at you, Pocket Legends!)

Re:It seems good

[Thugthrasher]

Cable connectioms across the country arent stable enough leaving 100 million potentioal users in the dirt. How about servicemen in afgahnistan? Or on deployment on ships? They cant play it either. They cant even play Starcraft againist each other in their down time.

Yes! And what about all those people on laptops or PCs that dont have the graphics horsepower to run the game?

What about those that have maxed out their harddrive storage??

Those bastards!! Why didn't they think of these things and design it so everyone can run it?

What about those things? People can go out and get a better graphics card. Buy a new hard drive. Even get a new PC or laptop. All of which with relatively minor expenses (yes, getting a new PC is expensive, but in the grand scheme of things, you can get a pretty decent one for not all THAT much). Many people can't just up and decide to get a better internet connection. Most people have very few, if any, choices as far as internet connections go. If that choice is nothing or a bad connection that cuts out a lot (like peragrin's connection, above), what do they do? The only option is moving. Moving is NOT as easy as buying a new computer, graphics card, or hard drive. Not at all. That's why it's different.

Re:It seems good

[Thugthrasher]

Actually there's more to it than that. This ties in directly with their decision to offer a real-money auction house. If you don't do everything in your power to prevent cheating - then that auction house will be rife with fraud, people posting a billion duped items etc. - which would massively devalue it for all players and make it unattractive to use.

And there's an easier, more publicly acceptable way to avoid that.
Offer cloud storage of characters, as they are. Allow them to be stored online.
Also allow the offline storage of characters. Allow them to be stored on a local computer and played anytime.
Only allow the cloud characters to be played when you are actually online. Only allow the cloud characters to use the auction house. Do not allow any character to move from offline to online. Do not allow any equipment to be traded between cloud and non-cloud characters.

Done. Now if you want to use the AH or any of the online features, you create a cloud character.
If you don't want those things, then create an offline character.

Re:It seems good

[x_IamSpartacus_x]

I'm not even in a remote location. I'm in a the capitol of Mozambique (Maputo) and I have a decent internet connection BUT I have a bandwidth limitation every month. Connection to the internet is NOT cheap here and it is not worth wasting it on single player games that eat into that cap. Always on connection? I do not know anyone in this city (or for that matter, on this continent... South Africa also has bandwidth caps for their connections) who could afford such a game.

Re:It seems good

[morari]

So yes, if Blizzard decides it can do without people living in remote locations buying this title, they will exclude them. They have every right to and they already did so before with their cash cow WoW, so it's not like they need those people to make the product viable.

Except that WoW was an entirely new game set in a genre that is expected to always be online. On the other hand, Diablo 3 the the second sequel in a series of games that had very enjoyable singleplayer modes, supported LAN play, and gave you the option of creating a character on Battle.net for multplayer. It's pretty clear to see that Diablo 3 is not living up to the feature expectations of the past two games. If anything, it's devolving into a some sort of halfbaked WoW.

Why not just do as they did with Diablo 2? If you want to play online, on Battle.net, you have to create a chracter that is housed on their servers. Otherwise, you can have your local (offline) singleplayer character to use by yourself, on the LAN, or on "Open Battle.net". Those are not difficult, or even unreasonable options to provide. Blizzard is apparently afraid of those imaginary software pirates though, and wants to make sure everyone can be monitored at all times... how else can an in-game economy work, right?

I very much enjoy the Diablo series. I played the first one for countless hours, both on and offline. I still routinely install D2:LoD on fresh systems, because it gets a fair amount of LAN play within the house. Diablo 3 though? Blizzard is shooting themselves in the foot. They've already shown off some flaky design choices (WoW-esque color pallette and character proportions, insta-health pickups, in-game stores, etc) but I was still keen to purchase the game and give it a go. But now? No, just no. Having to always be connected is a hassle at best that will add nothing positive to my experience, and not having LAN play will severly undermine the longevity of the game if the past two titles are any indication.

Blizzard has taken what would have otherwise been an immediate, thoughtless purchase and turned it into something that I don't even want to touch with a ten-foot pole. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised though, as all of the bigshots that made the previous two games great have long since left Blizzard. Here's hoping that Torchlight 2 can fill the void.

Re:It seems good

[i_b_don]

The structure of this game is more like an MMO than anything else.

I think this really nails it. This totally rings true. Blizzard wants this to be WoW light. They want people to focus on getting exp and items and looking to beef up their characters in a single persistent universe. No longer will this be about gaming with friends in 10,000 different instances of the game, but rather this will be about gaming in a single online universe. If you think of it in that light, Blizzards worldview makes total sense.

Giving people the ability to level up offline opens the game up to hackers to abuse. If you factor this in with the real economy market place, this is even more substantiated. If you have real money involved you have to be ultra careful regarding hackers and abuse. Giving people the ability to dungeon offline in an MMO is non-standard. Blizzard is just so absorbed in this idea of the game that they're surprised that anyone expects anything different.

If, on the other hand, you wish to play more single player or just with some friends a-la LAN style, then this is crap. Honestly, I'm not sure I care. I think I'd prefer if they had a single player that was disconnected from the MMO universe, and then you get the best of both worlds, but *shrug*, that's just not something I'm very interested in.

d

Re:It seems good

[Digital Vomit]

The problem is worse than that. Thanks to copyright law, Blizzard is allowed a monopoly on the game; no one else is allowed to take the source code, add value to it, then sell it. Imagine if your only option was to buy the "internet fridge" or no fridge at all.

Re:It seems good

[zget]

Judging by the market, I think drops will be completely handled on blizzards server. Probably various other parts of the game logic too. That's a huge work for the crackers to replicate, and it will never be like the original game.

Re:It seems good

[geminidomino]

Well, unless said developers moved on from ArenaNet too shortly after releasing Guild Wars, they probably don't deserve the revered status they seem to get, if the direction of the game since "Nightfall" is any indication.

NB: Former long-time GW player. 50/50 HoM, GWAMM

Re:It seems good

[Alsn]

Not only that, but the brilliant solution you suggest is in use in, you guessed it, Diablo 2(cloud characters= closed bnet, offline characters= open bnet/singleplayer/lan).

What it all boils down to is that Blizzard is doing the exact same thing they did with SC2. That is, removing features sorely missed by some of the paying customers(in the case of SC2, LAN) to try and squeeze some money out of pirates. Pirates who probably just won't play the game instead of actually buying it, although I admit that's mostly speculation on my part.

Re:It seems good

[Belial6]

The people that don't have enough graphics horsepower can just get a new laptop for a few hundred dollars. The people without enough hard drive space can get a new hard drive for less than a hundred dollars.

Solving the problem of not having a consistent internet connection for many would require selling their home, quitting their job and moving. For others it is simply impossible, as the solution would require that they commit crimes that would lead to them being imprisoned and thus not have a consistent internet connection.

Re:It seems good

[spire3661]

Blizzard's love of the fans died with the merger.

Re:It seems good

[brkello]

Um, usually when people say move out of the basement, they don't assume you are going to move in to a car. I moved quite a bit when I was going to school and always had a connection set up right away. This was through the late 90s until now. You guys complain about non-issues for the majority of people. And for the minority, just buy a different game if it is so awful.

Re:It seems good

[Belial6]

How about them? Well, yes. If Six Flags could supply them with attendance to an amusement park by simply leaving out a non-safety related security feature of their park, and they chose not to, they would be a shitty company. They would be a company that people should boycott.

This idea that you should be able to expect anything more than your basic human rights is ridiculous. Do you have a god given RIGHT to not have you wife give me a BJ every time you head off to work? No. Should you be pissed off if she is giving me a BJ every time you go off to work? Of course. What Blizzard is doing is a human rights violation. It is a asshole thing to do. The idea that being assholes to their customers is OK, and that people should be upset with a company until they are commuting humans rights violations is just silly.

Re:It seems good

[Hatta]

Of course emulators will exist. Emulators already exist for most games more than 10 years old. There's no reason to believe they won't exist in 80 years. Even if we get to the point where we're unable to compile Dosbox or MAME, we will have emulators for platforms that can.

Re:It seems good

[street_astrologist]

Fortunately, the odds are that you'll still be able to play single-player without a net connection, by applying a 25K patch made by some kid in Brazil the day after the game comes out.

Or, you could check out the excellent Torchlight series instead for much the same gameplay and no always-connected requirement.

Re:It seems good

[Hatta]

Actually, I *do* believe Valve will provide patches if they were ever to shutdown

If Valve were to go out of business, they'd be sold to another entity, or just plain be liquidated. Gabe wouldn't have the rights to release patches anymore.

Unless the patches exist today, and are held in escrow by an independent third party, that promise is worth nothing.

Re:It seems good

[Belial6]

So because you don't have a god given right to a faithful wife, it isn't "wrong" for her to sneak off as soon as you leave for work so that she can have a three way with me and mine? You are a mighty generous man.

Seriously. Something can be unfair and wrong without it violating some "god-given" right.

Re:It seems good

[Belial6]

Exactly. When the first MMO's were being announced, I was excited by the gaming possibilities. I thought they would bring an incredible new level of game play to us. Very shortly, I discovered that I don't want to play with random strangers. I love multiplayer gaming, but I love it with people that I actually like to play with. We used to set up 8 player games of WarCraft and StarCraft. Those were a ton of fun. The one time we invited a guy that made it not fun, we simply scratched him from the list for the next get together. MMOs remove your ability to filter out the people you don't want to play with.

Re:It seems good

[ShakaUVM]

Considering that Diablo 2 has precisely that option to make an online or offline character, I think the answer would be: they actually spent effort BREAKING the game for people with poor net connections.

I've avoided buying a single always-on game so far (fuck Ubisoft), and am really debating how much I want to play D3 now.

Re:It seems good

[street_astrologist]

Actually, the WoW server emulators are near flawless at this point for the 3.x series. 4.x support is shaky due to better obfuscation of opcodes on Blizzard's part, but you can play on an emulated Wrath server at this point and not know it's not legit. Diablo III presumably will follow WoW 4.x lead in making this less easy for the emu crowd.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, when I pirate things it purely to get them for free. Are you really that stupid?

Re:It seems good

[DJRumpy]

Not an accurate comparison. D3 is not an MMO. It was never designed to be an MMO and is currently not an MMO. The online requirement is purely fabricated by Blizzard, and not a requirement to play the game. For those who have no interest in the online 'community' such as it is, this is all negatives with no benefit whatsoever. In fact, without the choice, they are forced to deal with lag, even on good connections. I consistently get sub 20ms to major sites, yet I also experience lag on BNet, the fast forward effect, etc.

Those claiming it makes the game 'more secure' are deluding themselves. It's trivial to monitor packets on your local machine. One has to wonder exactly how much of this decision is based on Blizzards new parent company.

Why would you pay for a lesser product, done purely for DRM and/or profit which adds nothing to that group of users who prefer local/lan play and in fact takes away features/benefits that existed in the prior version? I suspect this will do more to spur on pirating than any other choice Blizzard could have made.

Re:It seems good

[street_astrologist]

Mod parent up. There is more to life than games. Blizzard is doing a favor to the world by making their latest crack less accessible.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Chinese gold farmers aren't a problem in WoW. They exist but you can easily ignore them and Diablo 3 will be the same way. Diablo 2 on the other hand...

Re:It seems good

[Genom]

Solution: Seal off singleplayer characters from interacting with anything outside the sandbox. Don't allow the characters to be used in multiplayer games of any sort. No access to the multiplayer/RMT AH. That character is confined to his/her little sandbox world.

Want access to those things? That's what Battle.net is for. The price you pay for that is needing a connection.

Protects the online game economy, and lets me play on my laptop wherever I might be, whenever I might be there, with or without available (and consistent) wireless.

Heck, a singleplayer-locked Hardcore character would be the *toughest* way to play (assuming no cheats/savehacks), as you'd be limited to whatever items dropped for you, and you wouldn't be able to get help of any kind, nor XP boosts for having multiple players in the game. Combine that with Hardcore's perma-death, and you've got a pretty unforgiving environment.

Re:It seems good

[McGuirk]

I think it's good. Sure, there are some situations where you cannot connect to internet, but it's really in minority. For the small trade-off you get cheat-free economy and you can play both single-player and multiplayer with the same characters. It's not like Blizzard will be closing down the servers anytime soon, battle.net is still running perfectly for Diablo 2. Besides, this can be mostly blamed on pirates. The 90% piracy rate on PC really means that game companies are starting increasingly to look into implementing as much of the game online as possible. While you can't play the game in an airplane, the overall return for that trade-off is much better.

What the fuck, Slashdot... -1 Troll is not the same as -1 Disagree. That moderation doesn't exist for a reason. Whether you like it or not, that post was legit and reasonable, not a troll... Unless I've just been trolled really hard.

Re:It seems good

[poetmatt]

They're taking out something that's easily there. It's not asking them to add something that magically doesn't exist. And if you weren't obtuse, you'd realize that it's also a cost savings to blizzard. Hello? they still make money AND don't have to pay for the bandwidth. They also can then promote the game at events that don't have internet. Man, what an idea! Going without a connection in 2011 must be so passe to the blizzard trolls.

Re:It seems good

[cheekyjohnson]

And for what reason? This DRM that is probably useless to almost everyone? You don't want cheating in multiplayer? Then simply don't allow single player accounts to be used for multiplayer (like games have already done).

Re:It seems good

[cheekyjohnson]

The structure of this game is more like an MMO than anything else.

Single player mode is not like an MMO.

Do you also complain about how people without internet are ignored for the sake of the MMO crowd?

No, because being offline would defeat the purpose of an MMO.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

Missing the point. It's not about how easy it is to add or remove.

The point is just because Blizzard is/is not doing something you like, it doesn't give you the free reign to do as you please without giving them any compensation.

The comment was directed at the notion that people won't pay anything, but would pirate. If you did pay, but just cracked it for your own purpose, that can be argued. This anon isn't too fond of IP laws as well, but that's a separate issue.

Re:It seems good

[fishbowl]

They shouldn't be "denied" anything. They should be expected to make wise choices.

Re:It seems good

[Elbereth]

Just for that awesome comment, you can be the deputy mayor of Bartertown, once I establish it.

Re:It seems good

[fishbowl]

If I'm in a remote location and happen to have a computer, I'll play Nethack or another roguelike.

It's never been a problem. I got into Diablo in the first place because it was a roguelike. I pretty much exhausted that game and the first expansion. Went back to Nethack.

Re:It seems good

[Cederic]

You forgot the UKs top seller on the PC, Football Manager, Company of Heroes/Dawn of War/60 other RTS games, Borderlands, the Total War series, the X series (X:btf, X2, X3:R, X3:TC), F1 2010...

Several of those can be played online, and some of them have massive online communities, but they all support disconnected extensive offline play, and I've personally clocked well over a thousand single-player hours on the various incarnations of those games over the past few years.

I do a lot of online gaming, but I still love my single-player gaming experience, with its pause button, its support for 'fail, retry' difficulty levels, its lack of children.

Re:It seems good

[fishbowl]

With all the head, hand and foot injuries from pitching horseshoes, I've always been surprised that they banned Jarts.

At my family place (big farm) we can get drunk and play horseshoes, shoot the M1 Garand, and drive a bulldozer, but we can't play Jarts.

Re:It seems good

[SanityInAnarchy]

Which distribution do you have,

Doesn't matter. If you care, publish debs and RPMs (especially if you have an apt or yum repository so we get updates that way too) and 99% of the Linux gaming community is ecstatic. If you don't, publish tarballs and 100% of the community is still happy.

IMO, the best yet model on Linux has been to distribute a demo, including the engine and almost all the content, under a license which lets Linux distros repackage and redistribute it themselves. Then, with that installed, you can provide an easy means for people to install the rest of the content once they purchase it.

What library versions do you have?

Don't be obtuse -- on Windows, almost everything ends up statically linked. Most games do that on Linux, too, or include copies of the libraries they care about. I'd much rather they link against system libraries and keep up to date, but that's not necessary.

What about the windowing system, since there is more than just one?

Not really. How many Linux gamers use anything but Xorg?

And WTF are you doing messing with the windowing system anyway? Even something as low-level as glut will let you flip to fullscreen at a desired resolution regardless of operating system, so why do you think that the choice of windowing system within the same OS will matter?

It really makes it difficult to release a product when Linux has so much variety based on what the system owner wants it to look like.

Ok, I'll bite.

How is this different on anything outside consoles and smartphones -- in other words, any open platform, where "open" includes Windows, OS X, Android...

Take Windows, since that seems to be the defacto standard. Ok, do we require Vista/Win7, or do we also support XP? If you support XP, you pretty much have to support DirectX 9, because 11 requires Vista -- doesn't matter that some hacker on the Internet backported, because if you're going to make people install hacked custom drivers from the Internet just to play your game, you've completely lost the "support" advantage. So now you're either stuck with DirectX 9, or you need to support multiple versions of DirectX. And what if the user has outdated drivers?

And then you DO have the issues of hardware support, where Blizzard would need to help troubleshoot why your fresh Debian install doesn't get sound on your machine but your friend who has a one year old Redhat machine can run it perfectly...think you would be happy to have support tell you they don't provide support and the problem is with your Linux install? Would you accept that if you were running Windows and had them tell you to contact Microsoft for anything that doesn't work?

If it's that sound doesn't work at all, then I think that's perfectly reasonable -- contact Microsoft, or your sound card manufacturer, or (more likely) something like Dell.

Other than that, how many times do you get a hardware issue specific to a game? The few I've had, I've been able to solve in a few minutes of Googling, and as a Linux user, I'd much rather have a port that refers me to the community when appropriate, than no port at all.

There are also support advantages here -- when something goes wrong, Blizzard has the entire Linux source, and likely the source for every component of your distro other than the video drivers, and that code is mostly going to be the same as on Windows. That isn't to say that it should be their job to fix the OS, but it does mean that when the problem is actually with the OS and not with their code, they at least have a chance of offering a patch.

Probably a much more practical advantage is that it is possible for Blizzard to produce a livecd (or dvd), probably not terribly hard to make the game disc itself bootable, which would allow people to verify whether the issue was with their hardware, or with Linux support for t

Re:It seems good

[SanityInAnarchy]

Why wouldn't they be able to release a patch before it was sold or liquidated? I get that after the deal there'd be no choice...

But I agree it would mean a lot if the patches existed today. Only problem is, if so much of the HL2 source was "obtained" and released on the Internet, I have to imagine the same would happen to the patch -- and I also have to imagine the patch would be difficult to maintain and test while being kept in escrow.

Maybe it'd be better to put enough financial and legal resources in escrow such that a developer can be hired to create and release the patch if Steam's service ever dies. (Not just if Valve itself dies, but if the service does.)

Re:It seems good

[SanityInAnarchy]

They would have to patch every single game.

Why not just patch Steam itself? To the extent that Valve has any control over this at all -- that is, to the extent games aren't also including crap like SecuROM -- the game is more or less asking Steam whether it's authorized, or whether the user is online, etc. Seems to me, Valve could simply patch Steam to allow perpetual offline mode without the initial registration -- problem solved.

Said patches would have to be tested and distributed. At a time Valve would be closing up shop that's a lot of additional expense they could not justify.

That's a bigger worry. While I don't think they'd be terribly difficult to create or distribute, any additional complication could spell death for the project.

Someone suggested creating the patches now and putting them in escrow. I'd rather see legal and financial resources in escrow such that a developer could be hired to finish the job.

Not to mention that at the same time, people who relied on "oh I can redownload any time I want" will start to hurriedly redownload ALL their games to back them up before Valve will be gone.

I can see this being a big problem, though not entirely insoluble. Here's a scenario:

1. Valve stops Steam from updating games.
2. Valve directs users to a torrent tracker they run -- or even to a third-party -- on which "backups" of each game are stored. You can create these today, so no code has to be written to support these.
3. Gamers who care about this and are currently panicking because of the updating issue go torrent those games. This is exactly the sort of traffic BitTorrent is designed for.
4. If DRM is still an issue at all, gamers are warned to install from those backups now.
5. Valve releases the final patch for Steam.
6. Steam auth servers are shut down.

If DRM is an issue at all, the final Steam patch would disable installing from those backups, and change the backup mechanism to produce different, incompatible backups. I have to imagine that they wouldn't care at this point, though, so maybe the final patch would allow installing from backups without verifying that it's a legitimate Steam account. This would effectively make the games DRM-free, but also massively pirated the moment that patch hits the Internet, since we now have legitimate torrents which can easily lead to installing a game you never owned.

However, this route requires a minimum of bandwidth (a torrent tracker would be bad, but nowhere near as bad as their CDN, and someone else would probably do it for free) and a minimum of development on their part (they're removing things from Steam, so no new features need be developed.) If they care about the DRM, it requires removing more features and a bit more coordination with the community, but it still seems possible.

Re:It seems good

[scot4875]

Translation:

"I don't feel that this will affect me personally, and everyone who does care about it must be some sort of sad-sack asocial loser with no sense of perspective."

--Jeremy

Re:It seems good

[AlamedaStone]

I loved a woman on the northern tip of cape cod once.

Having been to the northern tip of Cape Cod on many occasions, I find that highly improbable.

Re:It seems good

[kelemvor4]

Only town I've ever visited where I got weird looks for being with a member of the opposite sex.

Re:It seems good

[AlamedaStone]

those shitheaded SOB's at Activision

Oh, come on, you didn't like Pitfall? Everyone liked Pitfall.

Sure, but Pitfall 2 required you to drive to the store and show your receipt every time you turned on the Atari. They said they were "protecting the player experience". It did, too - I ended up having a great experience playing Dig Dug instead!

Re:It seems good

[murdocj]

Since most of the code that actually handles loot and such isn't going to be in the client, it's going to be server-side, good luck with that piracy thing.

Re:It seems good

[AlamedaStone]

"Buildings on this site are certified to run Diablo 4!"

Great. I already have a mortgage on Diablo II though, and it is a buyer's market.

Re:It seems good

[craash420]

I don't know anyone who doesn't have a persistent internet connection, except for those who specifically don't want one.

Hi, my name is John, I'm pleased to make your acquaintance. I rent paddle boats on the weekends and I have three to eight hours of free time each day. I have access to my laptop but not internet.

Blizzard is obviously willing to sacrifice non-connected consumers.

That's the most intelligent part of your post. Vote with your dollars.

Re:It seems good

[brkello]

If there are so many people who can't keep a connection, explain WoW. Yeah, they aren't worried.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is just because Blizzard is/is not doing something you like, it doesn't give you the free reign to do as you please without giving them any compensation.

He didn't suggest that it does. He said that was an example of WHY piracy happens, not that it makes it right.

Re:It seems good

[poena.dare]

All joking aside, I'd really like to know what connectivity is like for troops overseas.

Re:It seems good

[Eskarel]

Well aside from the fact that that's probably not enough to actually play the game it that's what you wanted to, not everyone pays European prices. I live in an ADSL blackspot, so I've got a shared wireless connection for the house. It costs me about $50/month for 7 GB of total traffic including uploads, if I wanted to carry it around I'd have to get another account. That's a crap load of money to spend just to play a single player game.

Re:It seems good

[DaVince21]

I have a different question, then.

Why is Diablo 3 like an MMO? 1 and 2 weren't... (Sure, they could go online, but that's not the same thing.)

Re:It seems good

[DaVince21]

Can you really compare circumstance to choice? No. Sure, living in such a location is choice too, but you'd hardly just up and move elsewhere.

Re:It seems good

[DaVince21]

If they don't, cracks will come along and do it instead. Not as legal, but has the same effect in the end.

Re:It seems good

[BitZtream]

I was thinking something like that myself. Back when I did wares, I was ALWAYS online, even at 2400 baud.
I guess they really want me to go back to that

Re:It seems good

[Kelsen]

I think this is disingenuous. Blizzard already provided the game experience they want to provide, as well as the game experience the customer wants in a single-player game. I have always had a connection, but always preferred to play D2 in single-player mode. I don't really mind this personally, but it is a slap in the face of the people who do mind it for valid reasons.

They had it both ways, and they deliberately fucked it up. That's different from providing it the way they want to.

Dave Kelsen
--
Anyone who told you to be yourself couldn't have given you worse advice.

Re:It seems good

[BitZtream]

Because all of the things you listed are requirements in order for the software to do what I, the customer wants the game for.

The always on requirement provides me no features I want, and does mean I can't use the game in situations where I would be able to if their artificial requirements didn't exist.

Re:It seems good

[BitZtream]

TW business class is less reliable by far than TWC home/roadrunner. Sad but true

Re:It seems good

[BitZtream]

*sigh*

Mom clients can be hacked too, and are regularly. Mom clients get updated far more often and are forced so taking hackers out is easy.

Diablo isn't going to get updated constantly or people will get annoyed even more, so you'll still be able to run a bot on it if you know what your doing, and it'll be far more profitable since there is an open real money market for those bots to profit from.

Learned nothing, they have

Re:It seems good

[pnewhook]

The only option is moving? Really? Can't find a different game to play? It it really that critical that you MUST play that game?

Re:It seems good

[Thugthrasher]

The only option is moving? Really? Can't find a different game to play? It it really that critical that you MUST play that game?

You're missing the point of the argument.
The only option IF YOU WANT TO PLAY THIS GAME is moving.
Just like, with the other system requirements, IF YOU WANT TO PLAY THE GAME, you must upgrade your computer.

Of course you can play other games or not play games at all. But that's the case with other system requirements as well. My point was that with the other system requirements, getting around them is a relatively minor expense. But with internet connections, it often is NOT. Oftentimes your only options are move or don't play the game. (So of course, people would pick don't play the game).

Re:It seems good

[pnewhook]

Really? I thought you were missing the point of the argument that every game requires a minimum of resources to run . If you dont have them then you cant run it. The makers of the game decide if the resource restrictions put too much of a demand on their users - if its too high then they limit their potential market - simple as that.

Clearly in this case they didn't believe that this would be too much of a restriction. The people who are complaining that their internet is not stable enough ("it went down three times last month!!") need to get a grip on reality and see what is really important.

Re:It seems good

[Thugthrasher]

Oh, I completely got the point of that argument. I never said they didn't have the right to decide that. This won't affect me, I'll probably buy the game. It will affect a friend of mine (obviously, he lives somewhere else), he will not buy the game.

Obviously, Blizzard decided that the number of people affected by this wouldn't be enough to affect their bottom line. Maybe there is too much outrage over it or maybe Blizzard didn't realize how much backlash there would be and that it might affect their bottom line more than other system restrictions.

But none of that is relevant to the point I was making. If you look a few posts up, what got us onto this subject was peregrin's asking how this was different from other system requirements. It's very different from other system requirements because of the points made above (the price and inconvenience of finding a new connection, especially in some areas is on a much different scale than just upgrading your graphics card). So, by having other system requirements, you limit yourself to those who have a computer that can run your game AND to those who are willing to spend a relatively LITTLE amount of money to get there (and the "minimum" requirements are also not usually the minimum...you can play with less, but just often things don't run as well). With this, the majority of people who DON'T have the minimum requirement only don't have it because they CAN'T without moving. It's not as simple as that. So they are very different. That was the point.

Re:It seems good

[Clock Nova]

I don't really understand how this game is even played multiplayer. I played all the way through D1 and D2 many, many times, and never felt the need to go on-line with them. The story is based on a single hero, and is long enough to require the player to stop and save the game periodically. How can that be adapted to a multiplayer setting? How is that even fun. Diablo is a single-player game at its core; adding more players seems a bit tacked on to me.

Re:It seems good

[Anonymous Coward]

We'd look down on you too, but we have things in our schedule so there's really not enough time. We have to settle for ignoring you most of the time; sorry.

They are starting hitting the wall!

[aglider]

While nowadays it makes sense to think about "always on" connections, having this as a requirement for games DRM is too much.
Of course they want to be able to shut your game down at any time (in case of illegal copies or expired subscriptions) and that's the only way to do it.
But probably, a few changes in the sales model would achieve the same results.

Single Player?

[Anonymous Coward]

it seems that most of what they are doing is related to trying to keep a truly secure, cheat-free economy in Diablo III

Could someone explain how a SINGLE player game would affect the economy of the ONLINE game?

The only possible reason for this is that they intend to let you buy items for your single player game from the Auction House.

As shown with Ubisoft games, it probably won't take long for the hackers to break the DRM and post the "clean" version on torrent sites. Which means that for those who have no interest playing online, once again the pirated version would be superior to the paid version as you could play anywhere.

Ironic.

Re:Single Player?

[Vaphell]

Could someone explain how a SINGLE player game would affect the economy of the ONLINE game?

no, because it's impossible. Bullshit excuse is just that, a bullshit excuse.

Re:Single Player?

[flimflammer]

The only possible reason for this is that they intend to let you buy items for your single player game from the Auction House.

You answered your own question.

No doubt the connection isn't just going to be a persistent online check. They're likely going to tie in drops, character, and inventory to the server instead of the client, so the concept of a patched offline version seems more like a pipe dream. If they control the generation and storage of items, they don't need to worry as much about people hacking in items and then trying to sell them.

Re:Single Player?

[whoop]

Right, the item drops will need to be tightly controlled for the real-money auctionhouse. Otherwise you'll have a major crash when cheaters generate 10,000 Swords of Awesomeness and flood the auction with them at $0.25 or something.

Re:Single Player?

[LazyBoot]

it seems that most of what they are doing is related to trying to keep a truly secure, cheat-free economy in Diablo III

Could someone explain how a SINGLE player game would affect the economy of the ONLINE game?

From what I understand, they plan to have us use the same characters in both single and multi play.

Re:Single Player?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/8/8/

Re:Single Player?

[TriezGamer]

It's quite likely the game will have no code for saving a client-side character, as the entire game is focused on an always-online connection. Hacking a client-side save system is non-trivial.

Re:Single Player?

[Brainman Khan]

There will be an online Auction House to buy and sell items for real money. Cheating would break this feature. Its a new direction in gaming and one worthy of exploring,. Real currency for single player gaming. It may prove succesful and may bomb (Blizzard has the coffers to take this risk). It will be interesting to see what happens. Now if you will all excuse me I have to use the ebony wand on the kestral to get you off of my lawn.

Re:Single Player?

[Darinbob]

I think it's because single player is the niche market now. The game devs are focusing on the multiplayer aspect because all that competitive testosterone makes a lot of money. There's been a slow evolution away from single player games, from initially having just an optional and rudimentary multiplayer ability to now having an optional and rudimentary single player ability...

I always thought this stuff was silly, and similarly thought Diablo was silly as well as blizznet. If you don't trust the people you are playing with then why are you playing with them?

Re:Single Player?

[Sable Drakon]

Obviously, you don't know thing one about Diablo 3. The reason the single-player experience is able to effect the economy of the online game is a) Diablo 3's Auction House and b) single-player characters are fully usable for online gameplay and vice versa. So do a little research before simply posting a kneejerk reaction comment.

Re:Single Player?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, but misses the point and is objectively wrong.

Re:Single Player?

[mgiuca]

You mean "hacking a server-side save system is non-trivial"?

Re:Single Player?

[wye43]

Perhaps even more, there will be entire parts of the game that is not being present/executed on the client side. From what they told us, that's exactly whats happening. Creating a "single player" game consists of connecting to a server that hosts the game.

So we are not just talking about a "hack", but an entire part of the game functionality. You will basically need a server emulator to play a self hosted single player game. Eventually, it will happen(just like with Diablo 2 or wow pirated servers), but it will take some time - and it will have just a subset of the features of the official ones.

My advice: just pay for the damn game, its going to be awesome and they deserve the reward for all that work.

Re:Single Player?

[Stuarticus]

Surely the pirates could just create some kind of "save state" that stored all the game data currently in use. Probably create pretty big save files, but I wouldn't actually be too surprised if it loaded quicker than logging into the DRM server, downloading a save and opening it...

Re:Single Player?

[Tharsman]

Because they want to force the online economy into your single player game.

What you earn in single player can be sold online, and you can buy online to make your single player easier.

I think that last part is the key. They would had been able to make single player entirely unable to contribute to the online economy, but they want to make sure you cant opt out of the online economy, they want to make sure y ou are always tempted to spend your money online.

I don't care, they can keep their game. There are plenty other games out there I still have to beat and this one wont be in the list.

Re:Single Player?

[Kuruk]

Could someone explain how a SINGLE player game would affect the economy of the ONLINE game?

Sure there becoming greedy bastards like everyone else. Everyone seems to want to tie you online.

Single Player Cheating

[captjc]

When it comes to a single player game, who cares if I cheat? If the game gets hard in a place, I have nothing against cheating. I can't stand endless grinding in single player RPGs so I cheat. If anything, I would rather have games that make it so I do not need to cheat. Batman: Arkham Asylum was, for me, the perfect game. There was no grinding, no real difficulty spikes, and never did I feel that any boss or puzzle was impossible.

For multiplayer, fine. put cheat detection, require Battle.NET, whatever. If I am playing with other people I want to feel that the games are fair. But don't restrict what I can do on single player. If what I do in single player impacts multiplayer so much that it requires these kind of measures, then that is just plain bad game design. Also, until I have broadband internet access everywhere I take my laptop, constant internet requirements are going to guarantee I will not buy the game.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[TheRaven64]

Sometimes, cheating in multiplayer is fine too. We had one LAN game of Diablo II where most of us had characters that had completed the game once so could play on the second difficulty level. One player had never played the game before. Someone found a character editor online and we put together a character for him that was at approximately the same level as the rest of us. With something like battle.net, that would have been impossible.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use the same characters in both single- and multiplayer.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[captjc]

I believe that it is a bad design choice. However, as someone posted above, a compromise to that would be to give an option when you create a character to have it be an online or offline character. Choose offline, and you can play the game without the anti-cheat constant connection requirement but without all the advantages that come with it. That way, those who want the online stuff can have it, those who want to play the game offline still can.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that your single player character can be easily ported to and from multiplayer, so yes, what you do in SP affects MP unless they make a system that allows offline SP and blocks that mode from moving characters to MP.

I honestly don't care. I'm always online when I'm at my PC. If my net connection goes down I have at least two backups I can use (phone tethering, neighbours wifi etc). This is a game that lets you spend and make REAL MONEY. I'm not going to touch that if I think people are playing the system through offline cheats.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the reason is you can play your character across single or multi-player. The only difference is how many other players you play with. The economy will still be connected. In other words, cheating in single-player will effect multi-player as you would be able to hack the game and farm items to sell for real money at a obscene rate that was not intended.

You've got to look at the whole picture and stop thinking about this game like games from 5 years ago, whether you agree or disagree with the connect, it's needed to for security of the economy and the plans they've laid out.

However, we could debate if they put those game economic models in the game to cover up or lessen the blow of going always on for piracy reasons, or if it's a feature they feel strongly about for the game experiance.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

... If the game gets hard in a place, I have nothing against cheating. I can't stand endless grinding in single player RPGs ...

How about some new items from the Diablo 3 store to help you out on your quest during the hard parts?

Re:Single Player Cheating

[AngryDeuce]

For multiplayer, fine. put cheat detection, require Battle.NET, whatever. If I am playing with other people I want to feel that the games are fair.

The funny thing is, the online portion of the game still won't really be fair because you're going to end up with a metric shit tonne of kids with their parents credit card paying to win, not to mention the hordes of Chinese gold farmers that are going to be grinding the items out to sell to them. Online play in Diablo 3 is gonna suck without a group of people you know in real life to play with.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

And really, with the Real Money Auction House being put into place, they're offering a way for people to get a leg up on the difficulty by just paying a couple of bucks for a shiny new item. That's the catch though, the ONLY reason Blizzard has made D3 online only is to drive people to the RMAH to drive sales there and help line ActiBlizzard's coffers.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

Counterpoint: PVP (Player versus Player for the TLA opposed)

Diablo 3 will have PVP. You can take your 'single player' character and pit it against your friends. Your single player character is your multiplayer character. There is no difference.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Hatta]

Batman: Arkham Asylum was, for me, the perfect game. There was no grinding, no real difficulty spikes, and never did I feel that any boss or puzzle was impossible.

Doesn't sound like much of a challenge then. What's the point in playing it?

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to a single player game, who cares if I cheat?

I've seen speculation that Blizzard actually cares. Since they're provided an official, for-cash item auction house, anything that makes the game easier for players is competing with their revenue stream. Pretty disgusting, if you ask me.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Goboxer]

This. Nearly everyone would get most of what they want. The game would be playable in any circumstance thus widening their market.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar situation with a friend in Diablo 1, he started with the barbarian and I had a 12 or something like that mage. I would cast on him all my defense spells and heal him every several seconds. Enemies spawned would be to my own level of difficulty, meaning that they produced so much experience. In a few hours he was nearly my same level, but we liked the combination so much we kept doing it. Of course the story would have been much more painful the other way round...

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Jonathan_S]

Diablo 3 will have PVP. You can take your 'single player' character and pit it against your friends. Your single player character is your multiplayer character. There is no difference.

That's a design change that Blizzard choose to make.

Diablo II had PVP but there was still a difference between the online multiplayer character (battle.net) and the local character (single player/lan play). If you wanted cheat protections you played on battle.net, you're character was hosted on their servers and you had to have an active internet connection to play. If you wanted to play locally or just lan play with your friends you could use a non-battle.net character but you'd lose cheat protection.

You could never mix non-battle.net and battle.net characters so the only people affected by character or equipment edits were you and friends on your lan.

So Blizzard removes all that non-battle.net functionality in diablo III and tries to sell it as an improvement. And they wonder why there's a backlash...

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Machtyn]

I would agree with your assessment, except we are discussing Diablo 3. Having played through D1 and D2, there really wasn't anything to the game, but the grind to the end boss. Boil it down and it is a simple hectic mouse clicky game with pretty graphics. But it is a grind. If you want a game that doesn't require a grind, the Diablo series is not it - I would suspect that no action RPG is without grind. For me, there is nothing wrong with that.

Of course, one way to lessen the grind of Diablo (at least in D2) is to play the various characters, but you are still grinding the entry levels up to where the character actually becomes useful and interesting.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[elrous0]

If the game gets hard in a place, I have nothing against cheating.

L.A. Noire did a pretty good job handling that, I thought. If you failed 3 times at a physical challenge (a car chase or whatever), it gave you the option of skipping that section. I tried to avoid it, but I did use it once--in that section where you're on the swaying platform of the movie set and have to balance it to get across. Fuck that noise, I'm playing L.A. Noire, not Uncharted.

Now some might complain that this makes it too easy. To them I say:

1) You don't HAVE to use it. Feel free to set the game to "Crazy Insane, ARE YOU MAD!?!? Hard" difficulty and play it without ever using this cheat feature.
2) Games are supposed to be FUN. Some of us appreciate that, and aren't in it for a frustrating contest of endurance.
3) Fuck off!!

No necessarily in that order.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll rush him for runes.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[darkstar949]

Sometimes people like to play games they find fun, not everyone wants the game to play games that might stress them out before they finish the game. I have a small collection of games myself that I just gave up on after difficulty spikes or reflex based puzzles. A gradual ramp up over the course of the game is one thing, but I'm not a fan of games that surprise me with major difficulty spikes midway through the game.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

Single player cheats bleed over to multiplayer. It's not about you cheating, it's that the cheat tools exist and can be modified for online play.

Since Diablo 2 was overwhelmingly online 10 years ago, D3 will be even moreso even if they allowed single player.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[captjc]

It depends on the game, really. Dungeon crawlers like Diablo and Torchlight, that is the main game. It doesn't usually feel like grinding unless you get to a part and are completely inadequate to fight the monsters. It is just going from one end of dungeon to the other, upgrade your weapons and go to the next. Then you have games that have grinding for the sake of grinding, usually as a way to extend the play time. The problem is when just completing the quests aren't enough to progress you have to randomly seek out and kill baddies for only the sake of increasing your stats. What it comes down to, is if it feels like you are progressing while grinding it is fine, but when the grinding is independent of progress it just comes off as repetitive and boring.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[heathen_01]

And if one of the players has never played before how will that be an interesting experience for him or the group? Your counter argument appears to fail and countering the original argument. Are you a politician or a journalist?

Re:Single Player Cheating

[digitac]

Don't worry, that won't be an issue in any future Blizzard games. There is no more LAN play.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[LazyBoot]

... If the game gets hard in a place, I have nothing against cheating. I can't stand endless grinding in single player RPGs ...

How about some new items from the Diablo 3 store to help you out on your quest during the hard parts?

And before someone starts ranting, you will be able to buy items for ingame gold too.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[FlyHelicopters]

Sad that you don't know the answer to that...

The point of playing is for the story, the enviropment, the world the game is set in.

I didn't find Mass Effect to be a hard game, even on "Hard", but wow, the ending, the experience, the story. It is one of the few games in a long time that after the credits started rolling, left me speechless...

Hard has its place, but sometimes you want an interactive movie, it should be fun, more than anything else.

B:AA and ME were that, fun...

Re:Single Player Cheating

[LazyBoot]

You do know that you can buy items with ingame money too, right?

Re:Single Player Cheating

[captjc]

I didn't say it was not challenging. It just was not hard for the sake of being hard. It required thinking about the situation at hand, minding your surroundings and adjusting your strategy accordingly. It also never felt like the game was being unfair but that I was failing to see the solution. The major difference is that the former leads to frustration at failure the other leads to wanting to keep trying. The best part was that it discouraged the brute force solution and encouraged exploration and finding more creative solutions.

There are reasons that people play games other than just pure difficulty. Story is one. Feel is another. Some people play Halo because it makes you feel like a badass space marine. Ghostbusters: The Game made you feel like you were hanging out with the ghostbusters trapping some evil spirits. Batman: AA made you feel like you were the Batman - a badass vigilante that hides in the darkness and takes out baddies one by one using his wits and his wonderful toys.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[nitroscen]

For multiplayer, fine. put cheat detection, require Battle.NET, whatever. If I am playing with other people I want to feel that the games are fair. But don't restrict what I can do on single player. If what I do in single player impacts multiplayer so much that it requires these kind of measures, then that is just plain bad game design. Also, until I have broadband internet access everywhere I take my laptop, constant internet requirements are going to guarantee I will not buy the game.

There's one caveat to this argument - for Blizzard game developers, it would take more time to create a single player mode*.

The game is currently developed as a client/server relationship - the Diablo 3 client intentionally doesn't have everything needed to play the game*. This is in contrast to it's predecessor, which had a very weak client/server relationship (and it's why in Diablo 2 there are dozens of map hacks and other cheats that function on Battle.net)

So sure, they could create a single player mode mode that cannot log into Battle.net that doesn't have this relationship. But it would require a lot more effort for a subset of their audience. Like Starcraft 2, I bet they decided it wasn't worth the extra development. I also bet they didn't expect such an outcry, especially since Starcraft 2 already set their precedent.

*Note - pure speculation. I have no sources. I'm just a Diablo 2 player and software developer.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[TheRaven64]

Diablo II also had PvP. You could have form alliances, or you could fight. If you killed another player, you could steal his ear as a trophy and loot his corpse. That was why most people who played online against people that they didn't know used battle.net, where the characters were stored on the server and couldn't be modified. You could create a single-player battle.net game to level up. Alternatively, you had client-stored characters, which you could use on a LAN game or in single player, without an Internet connection. Both modes were available, and people who had no intention of playing online were not forced to have an Internet connection to play the game.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Alphanos]

Who cares if you cheat in a single player game? Blizzard does. They care because they want to sell you those cheats for real money in their new auction house, and if you can cheat for free then you're not paying them to do it.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares if you cheat in a single player game? Blizzard does. They care because they want to sell you those cheats for real money in their new auction house, and if you can cheat for free then you're not paying them to do it.

You don't understand how the auction house works. Blizzard isn't selling anything through it. Only players are.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[TriezGamer]

I think part of the problem is the myriad complaints from people who played Diablo II offline, in a single-player environment, and invested hundreds of hours into a character. If your circumstances change such that you suddenly want to play online, you don't have to throw those hundreds of hours away and start from scratch. This happened to many people in Diablo II and people often complained about it. To actually 'solve' this problem, Single Player (or in D3's case, characters played solo) need to be kept in the same secure environment as multi-player characters.

Incidentally, the always-online aspect of the game means characters are stored server-side. This is something that I haven't seen people bring up much on the issue -- effectively migrating your characters to any machine you can log in from.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[TriezGamer]

Blizzard isn't selling anything on the new auction house. It is an entirely player-driven AH. Please educate yourself before posting.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[spire3661]

I knew some feeb would bring this up. A GOOD game wont have difficulty spikes, it will have a nice curve that teaches you what you need to know along the way. Its a hero's journey.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[spire3661]

LOL, you honestly think it will stay that way? Blizz WILL sell its own stuff, you can bet your ass, just look at their history. " WE will never allow PvE to PvP transfer, EVER (except when you pony up $25...)" "We will never sell items or services that give an advantage (RealID grouping, remote AH, I dont care what you say these items give REAL advantages to those that pay over those that dont)

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

This. I just did that yesterday in order to play with a friend which is half-way the game but we wanted to play together.

They just want to control everything and they will not allow mods. This game will be as crappy as many MMORPG but without the M. What is the drill to play this shit instead of a true MMORPG. Anyone?

Re:Single Player Cheating

[J. T. MacLeod]

Are you implying that challenge requires grinding, sudden spikes in difficulty, or feeling that something is outright impossible instead of simply requiring skill/attention/effort?

Re:Single Player Cheating

[SpanglerIsAGod]

It's all about the action house nothing. They just want to prevent people for duping items the get on their single player game and selling them for real cash.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[SpanglerIsAGod]

You would also have to prevent offline characters from participating in the action house but that doesn't seem like a problem to me. But then I wouldn't buy anything from it anyway.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP

Re:Single Player Cheating

[theangrypeon]

" WE will never allow PvE to PvP transfer,"

Once BC hit, the notion that PvP leveling was "harder" was a bit overblown. The way the soloing experience is now, the difference is almost non-existent. Blizzard at the end of the day decided that the convenience of making it easier for friends to get their characters on the same server than maintain this fiction that leveling on a PvP server is harder than PvE.

As for Blizzard themselves selling items in the AH, I doubt it'll ever happen. Blizzard wants player participation in the AH. That's where there real money maker is going to come in for them: making sure there's a good volume of transactions.

Let's say for example, blizzard decides to release a sword for all players to buy. That sword will probably have an infinite supply, since Blizzard is the one selling it. Sure, blizzard will make quite a bit of money, but at the same time they will lose money from all the players that will no longer place their swords on the AH. After all why bother placing your sword on the AH when players are just going to buy the Blizzard one instead. Ultimately, more player fueled transactions will mean more money for them in the long run.

There's also some potential legal quandaries to take into account as well. Since Blizzard items would be of infinite supply, they would have an inherent advantage over player found items. Also given that Blizzard has immense control over how often items drop in the game world, this screams of foul play potential. This would be a market that is run by blizzard involving real money that would be potentially rigged in a way that blizzard items would have a huge advantage over player items. I'm not sure of what specific laws that would run afoul of, but I can't imagine that not causing some sort of legal problems.

As another example, let's say I find a super rare sword that regularly auctions for $2000. Then the next day as I'm about to put it up on the AH, Blizzard put up a sword with better stats that anyone in the game can buy for $25. I (and others who are in possession of swords that used to sell for more) could in theory sue Blizzard over that. We probably wouldn't win but the potential legal headaches probably wouldn't be worth it to Blizzard every time they released an item into their AH.

So don't worry yourself about blizzard selling items themselves. It probably won't happen.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[RobertLTux]

and whats with these games where you in sections have to

1 do a random action to open a secret door
2 collect 5 different random things
3 place these items in 5 random locations (sometimes multiple times)

a good game should have someway of telling you what to do next so you always know (with maybe a few extra things to do along the way)
and if you want to get CUTE with things have your triggers make sense (statue of neptune minus his trident should give you a hint that you might want to find his trident or Tiles in an incomplete pattern most likely means you need to find the missing tiles or an barrier that is composed of FIRE might mean that you need to find an ICE weapon)

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Quirkz]

I stopped playing God of War about ten minutes into the game, when I fell off the narrow walkway into the sea and died FIFTEEN TIMES IN A ROW. I'd heard a lot of good things about the game, and I feel silly it's sitting on my shelf wasted, but there's no way I'm putting up with more of that crap.

Call me lousy at the game if you want, but if there's no way past a pointless precision obstacle I'm just not playing your game, and I'm not buying any of your sequels.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Bengie]

Because your single player toon is the same toon for multiplayer

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Wingfat]

umm.. did you play Diablo 2 online at all? or still (like I do)? I had tons of hacks back in the day that all ran against their Battle Net servers and was able to hack not only my Char online (stats and items), but if you got in the same room as me i was able to delete all your items or mod them in a way that would crash your Char totally. Yes i (Wingfat) was one of those guys back in the day that would kill you in town (Diablo 1) and then go brag in the chat room about smashing your head in in-Town, then you would complain and find my Defender Char (KillerJoe) to go "kill" wingfat and get his ear for you for a price. those were the days.. lol I hate the fact it will be online only. I play games a lot on my Lunch break at work and 90% of the time dont have Wifi. This alone makes me not want to buy the game, i'll get it off a torrent site and hack it to pieces before i PAY for a game that i wouldnt be able to use in the way i want. Example - iPhones... locked down so you can't do things the "Man" doesn't want you to, but with a back door tips and tricks a some hacking time, you can unlock one and do what you will.. -well besides Flash in the case of Apple. lol

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Wingfat]

battle net characters CAN be modded.. check your ref before posting.

Re:Single Player Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

Pure speculation is right. The game already came with a local server. Blizzard has since removed it from the early beta's.

This is strictly about fucking players with DRM and money making schemes. One would expect no less from a company owned by Activision.

not about the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not about the economy. If it was, they would do the same thing they did for diablo ii. Local games were not part of the economy. Battle.net games were. There's no reason they couldn't do the same thing for Diablo III. Unless their real purpose is preventing piracy.

I'm having a LAN party in September. Starcraft II is not on the game list. Starcraft: Brood War is. I own Starcraft II, but not everyone coming does. They would all buy it if it allowed LAN play. As it is, we will be content playing Starcraft, Unreal Tournament Classic, and Terraria.

Re:not about the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah it is about the economy. If it was they would do the same thing they did for Diablo 2? Which is what exactly? Just let folks buy and sell items on third party websites because they had no way of stopping it? Have a periodic Ruststorm sweep where online players with dupes lose them? That was *real* effective let me tell you. *snort*

They're addressing a couple of things with the "always connected" bit, namely duping and inventory hacking, and people unable to use the same character being offline and online. Sure you can use a single player character on open battle.net but there is zero, and I mean zero, policing of hacks there. So if you want a good, clean game your odds of having that are reduced.

Another thing it addresses is DRM. I know we love to hate DRM but it has become a necessary evil. Now if the only purpose "always online" served in Diablo 3 was DRM (as it does in AC2 and AC:B) then I'd say to hell with that. But "always online" as DRM is NOT the only thing it is intended for, it allows a character to serve in "single player" and online play while also keeping the economy more fair and making Blizzard a bit of income from the inevitable sale of items.

Re:not about the economy

[gumbi west]

Yes it is, they can only sell you the tools necessary to pass the solo games in there store if they force you to play solo with stuff you purchase form Blizzard.

Re:not about the economy

[ildon]

This is not about the economy. If it was, they would do the same thing they did for diablo ii. Local games were not part of the economy. Battle.net games were. There's no reason they couldn't do the same thing for Diablo III. Unless their real purpose is preventing piracy.

Let's pretend for a second that we believe Blizzard really is "surprised" that people are upset about the always on requirement, and that they really did just do it out of the goodness of their hearts for only positive reasons.

Here's the end user experience for Diablo 2: I play single player by myself and kill Diablo on Normal, "beating" the game initially on my own, going at my own pace, finding out the story without getting it spoiled or being rushed through by someone who's already done it. Now I feel like I can go online with my friends and play on Battle.net. But! I can't use my wonderful amazon that I'm so proud of. I have to start over from scratch if I want to play on Blizzard's servers, or I have to play on "open battle.net" which is rife with hackers and cheaters, and doesn't offer things like the ladder. If I'm a really casual player, I might just not even bother with the whole online thing and play a different game, because of this huge hurdle of leveling up again, feeling like my time in single player was "wasted".

Not only that, but because this is now Diablo 3, and I was playing in "offline mode", I haven't earned any achievements for my battle.net 2.0 account or missed out on whatever other "bonus features" that require some sort of security enforcement to be recognized online that Blizzard decided to add to "enhance" the user experience.

My point being, there are legit gameplay and user experience reasons to require an always on connection. They might not be ones you're particularly interested in but they're still valid. And it's pretty obvious Blizzard has done the market research on this and seen how much of an impact, if any, it would really have on their user base. 11 million concurrent WoW subscribers (an "always online" game) and however many people played SC2 single player while connected to battle.net (not using its offline mode) plus however many people DID use the offline mode and how often those people had to "check in" every... I think 30 days to keep it in offline mode, plus whatever traditional polling and market research shit they do.

So improved user experience for most users, improved security to (hopefully) prevent cheating/duping/botting, and DRM to prevent piracy. Basically this is win/win/win for Blizzard.

Also:

Starcraft: Brood War is. I own Starcraft II, but not everyone coming does. They would all buy it if it allowed LAN play. As it is, we will be content playing Starcraft, Unreal Tournament Classic, and Terraria.

Casual LAN copyright infringement is still copyright infringement. I've done it, too, but I'm not going to try and claim it as some kind of right. I was playing games I didn't pay for. If companies come up with effective DRM that prevents me from casually pirating their game at a LAN, then guess what? I'm not going to casually pirate their game at a LAN. And if it's a particularly good game, if I want to play it at a LAN with my friends, then I will buy it.

Re:not about the economy

[TriezGamer]

There is talk on the official forums (without links so the threads don't get deleted) about a Battle.Net emulator of sorts that has enabled LAN play for SC2 with a modified client released in the last week or so. I haven't verified the claim (it's not something I'm personally invested in), but you might consider looking into it, if that's your thing.

Re:not about the economy

[fishbowl]

I think that Blizzard is happy enough to divest themselves of customers who are anything other than happy with their policies. The mass exodus when they introduced RealID in WoW seems to have boosted their bottom line, for example.

Re:not about the economy

[AlamedaStone]

Casual LAN copyright infringement is still copyright infringement. I've done it, too, but I'm not going to try and claim it as some kind of right. I was playing games I didn't pay for. If companies come up with effective DRM that prevents me from casually pirating their game at a LAN, then guess what? I'm not going to casually pirate their game at a LAN. And if it's a particularly good game, if I want to play it at a LAN with my friends, then I will buy it.

The GP was not suggesting infringement.

Two points - first, he said his friends wouldn't buy SC2 (nor will I) because of no-LAN, always online nonsense, but that they all owned SC1. Second - and more relevant - SC1 had that AWESOME feature that let you set up a friend with their own secondary install. I forget what it was called, but you could join any LAN game as long as someone with a full copy created the game. No infringement, user-friendly design.

I like WoW, for what it is. I don't have a problem with MMOs, they're fun. Games like Diablo online, however, are like some unexplored circle of hell (if you'll pardon the expression). You couldn't pay me to play D2 on battle.net, and it has nothing to do with cheaters. It's the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. D3 is just another single player game for me (and, it seems, many others). I'm deeply disappointed with this Activisionization, and as sorry as I'll be not to play, I have better ways to spend my money than supporting schemes like this.

Of course, there *will* be a crack. Nothing is foolproof, and there's no greater collection of fools than the cracking community.

Re:not about the economy

[Quirkz]

And what do I do when my buggy rural network connection keeps dropping on me, probably getting me killed, possibly getting my items lost? What kind of service is that offering me? Perhaps your point would be that they're helping other people enough they don't care about my fringe case. I'm still not buying the damn game, though, despite my great love for the first two in the series.

Re:not about the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Blizzard has released a free version of SC2 that restricts you to playing Terran, and on select melee maps. So long as you have enough Terran players to cover the lack of accounts, it should be possible to play.

Re:not about the economy

[ildon]

It's pretty obvious there was no "mass exodus" due to Real ID. They didn't start losing customers until after Cataclysm (which I believe is mostly either gameplay related due to changes in that expansion, or related to the extreme age of the game at this point) which was much later than the Real ID incident (long enough that you can't even chock it up to a ton of people paying 6 months at a time having their account finally expire at that time).

Re:not about the economy

[ildon]

What makes you think his friends "own" SC1? It's pretty implicit that they all "have" SC1 to play on LAN specifically because it's so easy to pirate, not necessarily because they purchased it.

Re:not about the economy

[AlamedaStone]

Quoting: "Starcraft II is not on the game list. Starcraft: Brood War is. I own Starcraft II, but not everyone coming does."

I think the implication is that while they don't all own SC2, they do all own BW. I think you're inferring what is not implied ;-)

Re:not about the economy

[mgiuca]

Casual LAN copyright infringement is still copyright infringement. I've done it, too, but I'm not going to try and claim it as some kind of right.

I'm anti-piracy. I buy games. I don't receive pirated games and I don't give out pirated games. But in a LAN situation, is it really "piracy" if we all play off one copy? 1990-2000 says it isn't. In fact, Warcraft II (1995) and StarCraft (1998) say "go ahead, play a LAN with one copy, but if you want to go off and play on your own, you have to buy it." There is an explicit feature for this, called "spawn", in which Blizzard encourages players to share around a limited version that can only join multiplayer games, for this very purpose. If I go to a LAN and eight people are going to play a game one time, am I really expected to purchase a full copy of that game just for a couple of hours (given that my friend already purchased a copy?)

To put it another way, if eight of us go to a friend's house to watch a movie, that my friend legally paid for, are we expected to each purchase the DVD just so we can all sit down and watch the movie one time? "Of course not!" any sane person would say. It is a basic right that when I purchase a DVD, I can watch it with my friends or family without them each having to purchase a separate copy. So why is the situation different when it comes to PC games? Moreover, why are we not outraged that this "right" has been taken away from us, and instead we have people arguing on forums that LAN piracy is bad?

The main argument against LAN piracy is "sure, it's OK for everyone to play at a LAN, but the problem is that once everyone has pirated the game, they won't delete it -- they'll go home and play it on their own. If they want to do that, they should pay for it." I absolutely agree. That's why "spawn" was such a genius invention -- if the option is available, I don't see why honest players would choose piracy over a legitimate "spawn" (certainly much nicer than having to download cracks and viruses). I think "spawn" is the ideal compromise between game companies and customers. But, a compromise is not what they're after, which is why Blizzard is glad everybody has forgotten all about spawn and public opinion has now come so far along that people argue "of course they had to ban LAN, because there was too much piracy!"

Re:not about the economy

[mgiuca]

And what do I do when my buggy rural network connection keeps dropping on me, probably getting me killed, possibly getting my items lost?

well, there are other games to play for times like that.

Re:not about the economy

[ildon]

I think you're being naive.

Re:not about the economy

[ildon]

You're trying to justify/rationalize your infringement. It's still infringement. WC2/SC1/Diablo are extremely rare exceptions with their (somewhat crippled) "spawn" install. Even in the mid to late 90's they were an exception, rather than the rule.

Re:not about the economy

[ildon]

Also, SC2 now (as of about a week ago) has the "unlimited demo" client where you can play Terran in custom games on a limited map pool and the first couple single player missions.

Re:not about the economy

[ktownhero]

But do you actually believe that the people would buy SC2 if it allowed LAN play? The catch-22 is that when you allow it, people pirate it, and when you don't allow it they try to pretend like they would be willing to pay for it. You can't have it both ways, and we all know that "casual LAN parties" very rarely include playing games that everybody paid for.

Re:not about the economy

[Yamioni]

My point being, there are legit gameplay and user experience reasons to require an always on connection.

I halfway agree with you. But it really needs to be a toggle switch. If you require a persistent connection in order to allow people to take their single player toons online at any point they wish, and want to prevent cheater toons from entering the mix, okay, I get that. But I also want the option to turn it the fuck off too. I want that little checkbox to click that says "I accept that this toon will permanently remain offline" and from that point not require a persistent connection. Don't force me to play the way you want me to play simply because you didn't want to write some additional code for the client. It's fucking lazy, and it fucking pisses me off.

So if Blizzard releases this game with the persistent connection as a "locked on" feature, they can lick my hairy nutsack. I won't spend one red cent on it.

Re:not about the economy

[AlamedaStone]

I think you're being naive.

It isn't naivete, it's reading.

Re:not about the economy

[AlamedaStone]

But do you actually believe that the people would buy SC2 if it allowed LAN play? The catch-22 is that when you allow it, people pirate it, and when you don't allow it they try to pretend like they would be willing to pay for it.

You can't have it both ways, and we all know that "casual LAN parties" very rarely include playing games that everybody paid for.

People will pirate it regardless, it isn't a catch 22. I can speak authoritatively that SOME people would buy it if it was more consumer-friendly - specifically myself and several people I know. Will I pirate it? Maybe, but probably not. Whether I do or not though, it is still a lost sale for Blizzard.

I know some people just writhe in self-righteous fury when someone says it, but these decisions DO result in more net lost sales than simply allowing LAN play (or true offline modes). Pirates gonna pirate. I would absolutely like to (and do!) support consumer-friendly companies, but what I do after I don't buy is irrelevant to their bottom line.

Re:not about the economy

[mgiuca]

But it's only "infringement" because the copyright holders have framed your perception of what infringement means. Surely there must be a difference between me sharing a game with a couple of friends for the sole purpose of playing a multiplayer game together for one afternoon and then having them all delete it afterwards, and me giving it out for them to play in full in their own time without having to purchase the game.

One is a single shared experience, and a powerful advertisement. The other is blatant piracy.

Again, I refer you to the DVD scenario: you wouldn't expect all of your friends to purchase a DVD for the purpose of a movie night.

Re:not about the economy

[ildon]

No, it's copyright infringement according to the law. Your opinion or "perception" don't really enter into it.

Re:not about the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen the economy in Diablo 2? It's horrendous!

People farm items with bots and sell them for real money, causing mass inflation in-game. This is exactly what Blizzard wants to prevent with these choices. The player who spends 15 hours to get an item he can sell for $10 shouldn't be discouraged because the item is suddenly flooding the market at $2 because a hacker developed a bot that farmed up a few dozen copies of said item. How is this NOT related to the economy?

Re:not about the economy

[trdrstv]

I'd also Add "OpenArena" (the opensource version of Quake 3 arena) and Track Mania Nations Forever to your LAN party. Both are Free, have low system requirements and are good fun.

Re:not about the economy

[trdrstv]

His friends don't need to "OWN" starcraft to have a Spawn install for a lan party. Hell it was designed so you only need 1 legit copy in an 8 player game, no piracy involved there.

Diablo piracy??

[mvar]

Really? The Diablo series is most fun when played over battle.net, do they REALLY worry about the "90% PC game piracy" ?? That's bullsh*t . The only people who are screwed over this inexcusable decision are the legitimate players. There WILL be a pirated version of the game sooner or later. Maybe those game companies-execs should start thinking of better ways to counter piracy - what about lower prices? Ok now i'm being irrational..

Re:Diablo piracy??

[Elbereth]

The thinking is that pirates have a very short attention span. Most pirates are (theoretically) uninterested in playing games that are months old; if you can keep the game secure for a month or two, then the DRM has justified itself. The people who were sitting on the fence will purchase the game, rather than pirating it, and the people who would have been freeloading are kept off your servers, reducing your operating costs.

Does it really work out that way, in real life? Who knows. But the MBAs really aren't as stupid as you're making them out to be. They know that the DRM will be broken. They're not under some illusion that their DRM is unbreakable and that every pirate will be completely stymied forever, give up, and go buy their game. What they're trying to accomplish is to maximize the amount of sales that they get in the initial rush of interest, when the game is first released. Some companies will even release a patch that disables the DRM (partially or completely), once the game has been out for a while. Granted, in some cases, it takes years for this to happen, but maybe this will become more common and happen sooner, in the future, as it becomes adopted by more companies.

Re:Diablo piracy??

[mvar]

I agree that the MBAs are not stupid, but here we're talking about Diablo not some random title. It is one of the most successful game franchises, with a huge player base (there are thousands still playing D2 more than 10 years after its release) so I can't see why this justifies even a 1-2 month success of this DRM measure (and anyway it usually takes less than a weak for a ripped-pirated version of the game to be released). People (myself included) are already on the fence, D3 will probably be the most anticipated game for 2012 and it will probably break some sales record, but this achievement won't be caused by the fear of this DRM.. IMO this is a no-win situation for Blizzard, they're only forcing some of their customers (a tiny percent of-course) into piracy..the rest of us will buy the game and be utterly annoyed if the connection drops

Re:Diablo piracy??

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on. You work in the computer industry and claim the MBAs aren't stupid? Give me a break.

Re:Diablo piracy??

[Machtyn]

Fun is relative. I had more fun not playing on battle.net. I didn't have to worry about getting slashed when I stepped out of the town by a duper.

Re:Diablo piracy??

[Shados]

There WILL be a pirated version of the game sooner or later

There will be, like there is for Starcraft 2. It took over a year for it to pop out.

Just preventing launch day piracy supposingly saves almost as many sales as they will lose from pissing people off, since most pirates do so before the game comes out or a while after. If it takes, let say, a month before the "offline" version of the game comes out, Blizzard won.

And even if all this isn't true, its what they believe, so they win in their head. And since its their company, its all what matters to them.

Re:Diablo piracy??

[Anonymous Coward]

"The thinking is that pirates have a very short attention span", says who?

I myself have downloaded many old games to try them out prior to buying. With the state of certain games these days I purposely wait several months after release so that all the bugs can be patched.

FWIW, I don't think the age of the game matters, it's the quality.

Re:Diablo piracy??

[Vaphell]

single player was available right off the bat in warezed sc2, you are talking about bnet emulation that allows for lan play.

MMO style economy in a single player game?

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA: We sacrifice a cheat-free environment to give players the most options, they are sacrificing options and flexibility for security of the economy like you would in an MMO. I understand their approach and sympathize with the technical difficulties of what they are trying to do.

You know what would work out amazingly well for everyone involved?
If when you started up the game, there were this screen; and it would have (among others) the options "Online Play" and "Offline Play".
If you choose "Online Play" then you get all of the benefits and drawbacks of the always-connected system.
If you choose "Offline Play" then you don't need the internet connection, but you also have NO ACCESS whatsoever to anything that you may have which depends on the always-connected system.

If you want to do both, you'd actually have two unrelated characters/worlds/inventories etc.
A character who is started in Offline mode can never go Online (because you can't confirm it is legit) and a character who is started as Online cannot be used Offline because it is fully integrated with their servers (like an MMO character).

Or are they saying that unless you use the features of the always-connected system the game is totally unplayable because the balance is so poor that you have to use the RMT (Real Money Trading) auction house in order to succeed?

Re:MMO style economy in a single player game?

[GigaplexNZ]

You just described Diablo II (ignoring the open battle.net enhancement).

Re:MMO style economy in a single player game?

[delinear]

But... but... if they gave you the ability to play offline, they wouldn't be able to profit from people selling you better equipment through the in-game market! On that note, I expect this now means awesome drops will be one in a million, otherwise the market will be flooded with cheap junk nobody wants. Wow, if I hadn't already canceled my pre-order I'd be really psyched about the prospect of grinding hundreds of hours for no reward...

Surprised?

[Tridus]

Why is it that the only people who are surprised about this kind of backlash are the executives who never seem to notice that it happens every single time a game tries this type of thing?

Maybe their seven figure salary isn't high enough to pay attention to minor details like having a bloody clue what's going on in their own industry?

Re:Surprised?

[Hatta]

They're not really surprised. They fake surprise because the alternative is worse. They just don't fucking care.

Being tracked

[ciderbrew]

Another point would be - I just don't want to be tracked by yet another company. All my time spent, all the clicks I make. The usage habits within a UI, that I'm not aware of, that [could / can / will ] be used with other data sets at some point in time to identity me from the next guy. 15 mouse moves makes it me is a worry to think about. Also, it's another username/password account to deal with, to be hacked, to be used in wonderful ways you can't think of.

If I could sound sincere, I think I may almost have a decent point with this one. - Think of the planet [i don't]. How many extra tons of CO2 does this extra level of DRM cost our world? Every cpu in use and telephony item between here the there - needlessly used. Scale that up to millions of people worldwide ... It's EVIL! [needs more sincere]

Re:Being tracked

[strack]

dont do that man. dont use tenuous environmental concerns to bolster your argument. its done too often in the name of other causes, and it just smacks of grasping, when you already had some quite valid points.

Re:Being tracked

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need to readjust your tin foil hat.

Re:Being tracked

[Anonymous Coward]

If you haven't already, you should watch the documentary "The Corporation".

Re:Being tracked

[ciderbrew]

It's only tenuous to people who don't care about mother earth like I do. Hold on - did this reply use up all the things DRM uses needlessly? It did didn't it? Sorry ... :)

Re:Being tracked

[Anonymous Coward]

Tracking? Is that a serious concern? I would be more worried about being tracked on slashdot than diablo 3. Your style of frantic clicking will not be useful to data miners.

Re:Being tracked

[mgiuca]

I agree it sounds a bit like grasping to start bringing up environmental concerns here. But really, why not bring up the environment? Even if there is a small environmental impact, why should there be any impact at all? It all comes down to the fundamental principle of "if you don't need to do something, don't do it," or even more basely, the principle of simplicity. "Always-on" DRM is an unnecessary waste of power, bandwidth and server load. (Especially since I'm pretty sure this isn't just a heartbeat ping, the Battle.net server will actually be running the game state.)

Evolution in action

[Anonymous Coward]

Diablo 3 would be one of the most pirated games in history, if they didn't have the always-online requirement. People will claim that "it's hurting honest players", or "it won't stop piracy", but let me, in all seriousness, ask you this: if people didn't pirate games, would there have to be DRM? Do you think the developers WANT to spend extra money and introduce extra headaches into their products? They do this because PEOPLE STEAM THEIR GAMES, plain and simple. This is evolution, plain and simple. Pirates started the trend, game companies are just trying to keep one leg up on the virus, just like any other life form that wants to survive. People will point to this game or that game that doesn't have DRM, but let's get serious; their not Blizzard. They don't make some of the most popular games in history. If BLIZZARD decided to forego DRM, what small amount of goodwill they got (from people buying the game anyway) would be SWAMPED by the rampant amount of piracy that would occur. In a Bizarro universe way, I wish they WOULD forego DRM, get hugely pirated, lose tons of money, and fold up shop, just to prove once and for all that it's not THEIR fault, it's the PIRATE'S fault.

Obviously, chalk me up as someone fully in Blizzard's court on this one. Hell, I'd be fine with a hardware dongle.

Re:Evolution in action

[captjc]

They do this because PEOPLE STEAM THEIR GAMES, plain and simple.

When they outlaw steaming of games, only outlaws will steam games. I for one enjoy placing my game discs in my Veggie steamer. It gives my broccoli a nice tangy flavor. A copy of StarCraft is the only way to make good Sushi rice.

Re:Evolution in action

[ledow]

"In a Bizarro universe way, I wish they WOULD forego DRM, get hugely pirated, lose tons of money, and fold up shop, just to prove once and for all that it's not THEIR fault, it's the PIRATE'S fault."

And here you have the damning evidence that piracy is nothing to do with it. I have absolutely no doubt that they "lose" money through piracy. But I equally have absolutely no doubt that the proportion they lose is vastly less than the amount they spend on "DRM measures".

Just how much do you think it costs to keep an always-on suite of servers in a datacentre up to respond to potentially millions of copies of this game having to check in every five minutes (or more often), even if the game is sitting on a menu, not to mention programming and securing the thing in the first place?

Combating piracy is about increasing revenue - not recouping lost revenue - by taking out the second-hand market. They want to steal the second-hand market's revenue for themselves - game shops go out of existence and publishers suck up the slack because there are NO second-hand copies of recent games which people can purchase instead - they HAVE to give their money to the publisher, or pirate the game.

It doesn't matter which path the user chooses because it works in the publisher's favour whichever way - the pirates "prove" their need for DRM (and you wouldn't have bought the game anyway) and the direct sales they'd never normally get give them income they would never have had before.

They wouldn't do the hardware dongle - unless it was restricted to X amount of computers too. There's no way it would be profitable because it wouldn't stop piracy (the software has to check for the dongle) but you COULD sell the dongle + game on to someone else and cut the publisher out of the deal again.

Why do you think they have those schemes now where you can "activate" a second-hand game for a additional fee? Because they want the second-hand market to die, and to take the income that industry previously enjoyed for themselves.

The damning fact is that most games publishers are actually doing extremely well considering the fiscal climate of the last few years. I can't name a big software house that's gone out of business whereas in the 80's they were up and down like yo-yo's. PopCap make cheap, simple, casual games that sells millions with no DRM and were just snapped up by EA for a cool $1.3 BILLION. Obviously, EA's games must be a complete loss for them to have that sort of money laying about, and PopCap must have been really struggling with a company valued at that sort of price.

These measures aren't about piracy because there has NEVER been an effective copy-protection measure and the best ones only work to protect the first few weeks of sales. Some software houses actually remove their DRM after the first year from existing games because it stops doing what it was designed to do - protect the initial production run from mass casual copying.

Don't be fooled - this is about destroying the second-hand market and making money from it. Valve do it with Steam, OnLive's business model is reliant on it, and now ordinary games publishers want in on the act. The only difference is that Valve, etc. are *honest* about their intentions. Blaming such measures on piracy is just a weak argument that's only partially true and can't be directly verified (or disproved) by anyone and it sounds a lot better than "We want more of your money".

Re:Evolution in action

[delinear]

DRM has so far done next to nothing to stop piracy - go check out any of the popular torrent sites and see the evidence before your eyes. DRM is meant to control legitimate users, not pirates. It controls what you can do with the game you bought, it controls (or more often prevents) resale of the game you bought, it allows them to add dial home code that gives their marketing people all kinds of interesting metrics when you play the game you bought. Repeating this "pirates are the reason for DRM" garbage is just allowing them to get away with pulling the wool over your eyes.

Re:Evolution in action

[benengel]

But what if people want to stir fry their games or boil them? Or maybe deep fry them? This fascist DRM has got to stop! Only when I am able to purchase a copy of Diablo 3 take it home and barbecue it up on my 4 burner in my backyard without having to PHONE HOME to Blizzard HQ will I be satisfied.

Re:Evolution in action

[Zirbert]

This AC said "I'd be fine with a hardware dongle." I agree wholeheartedly on this point (if not the rest of what he/she - oh, let's get real, this is Slashdot, so "he" - said). A hardware dongle would be much better than requiring an always-on Internet connection. It would free people up to play regardless of connectivity, and without using up their bandwidth quotas. And if (when) Blizzard/Activision decide, admittedly probably several years from now, that D3 is no longer generating enough profits to maintain the authentication server (or go under / get bought out / etc.), a hardware dongle wouldn't suddenly render us unable to play the game we paid for.

A game that requires constant (or even repeated) online authentication is only a rental. Rentals are $5, not $50.

I was really looking forward to D3. Now I'm disappointed for what could have been, and planning to start exploring D2 mods.

The game Blizzard is now describing does not deserve to be called Diablo 3. It's World of Diablo, Diablo Online, or Diablo The MMO. Any of which would be fine, but they would not be, and are not, Diablo 3.

It's keeping me from buying it

[g051051]

I just won't get it or play it. I recently got a refund on a Ubisoft game because of their "always on" DRM. I haven't bought StarCraft either, since I heard it has a similar requirement. I really don't care if Diablo III has a multiplayer component at all, since I'd never play it online in the first place. Developers are free to design their games as they wish, and consumers are free to vote with their wallets. I played all the previous Diablo games and expansion packs, and was really looking forward to Diablo III, but no game is so important that I'd put up with those restrictions. That's $120 that blizzard won't ever see from me.

I'm not always online

[stiggle]

My PC isn't always connected to the net - its a little hard to get a decent connection when you're out at sea. So I don't buy "always connected" games. Which is a shame, because there are some great single player games out there which have been crippled by needing a permanent net connection.

It was on my list of games to get - as I loved the previous Diablo games, but if they're going to cripple single player with online DRM then I'm out.

Re:I'm not always online

[Elbereth]

What about a satellite connection? Could that work? Since all you need is a network connection, the latency shouldn't really be a problem.

Yeah, it sucks that they're using this online DRM, but there'll probably be some sort of crack, eventually. No DRM scheme is totally unbreakable. Anyway, there's always classic Diablo, plus the Diablo clones: Sacred and Sacred 2 were both pretty decent, though they both have pretty strong DRM, as well.

Re:I'm not always online

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, I foresee someone "patching" D3 to allow not only single player-offline, but also LAN (maybe through a fake b.net server locally hosted, etc...)

Re:I'm not always online

[0123456]

What about a satellite connection? Could that work? Since all you need is a network connection, the latency shouldn't really be a problem.

Do you have any idea how much mobile satellite connections cost?

Re:I'm not always online

[GrumblyStuff]

Out to sea...?

*Gasps*

Pirate!

Re:I'm not always online

[Elbereth]

If he's got a yacht, then it's not an issue. If he's in the Navy, then it might be. :)

Re:I'm not always online

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting a satellite connection just so you can play single player games is the single most retarded idea I have ever heard of.

Re:I'm not always online

[IgnoramusMaximus]

A yacht is far less expensive then you think. Satellite connections (that work in the high seas) are far more expensive then you think.

You pay per megabyte at outrageous rates (your caps are also measured in megabytes). Your equipment that can track the satellite while the yacht is yawing and pitching costs more then the radar and the chart plotter to navigate your boat by etc and so on.

Oh and the latency of the satellite connection is always more than 1000ms ... since it takes more than a second at a speed of light for the signal to bounce off of a satellite.

In short: satellite connection suck donkey balls for gaming of any sort. Even if you are a multimillionaire you can't do squat about the atrocious lag since you are up against laws of physics.

If they are going to treat it like an MMO...

[Anonymous Coward]

...so will I, and wait to try it out whenever it goes to the "Free to play" model. No point in buying a game disk dependent on their servers being up.

Solution:

[emagery]

Just make an always-online and a never-online version, so you don't lose customers while not compromising the security of the online market.

Re:Solution:

[Anonymous Coward]

they cant do that. The reason they do it always online, is so that hacks cannot be created in single player and dragged over to multiplayer.

Re:Solution:

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop making sense! Stop it! This is /., you're supposed to foam at the mouth!

Re:Solution:

[Emetophobe]

Or just go back to the Diablo 2 way and store single player characters locally and multiplayer characters on their servers. There's absolutely no reason to require an internet connection for a single player experience, other then as a weak anti-piracy measure. They can claim it "improves the experience of the game" or whatever, but that's just marketing/orwellian speak.

Re:Solution:

[Anonymous Coward]

They already thought of this for other games: Sell a copy without multiplayer, but you can buy an online pass!

This is non-sense.Ever heard of closed battle.net?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pure non-sense. With diablo 2 you had basically 3 modes : local, open battle.net (in which you could play your local characters) and then closed battle.net (in which you had to start dedicated characters that were NOT stored on your computer)

  Now I have 2 questions for blizzard ?

  A] Why didn't you stick with this system which was BRILLIANT and part of the success of D2.

  B] How is your new system going to be anymore secure than a closed B.net ? I fail to see the difference. Cheaters in closed B.net D2 didn't use their local characters to cheat, they use dupp hacks and bugs in the game.

  On the other hand anytime my internet connection is down I won't be able to play d3 ? well Fuck you blizzard! I guess it's a total no go for. I'll just wait till someone hacks D3.

  I basically convince my parent to send me to the US for the vacation just to BUY D2 before it was out in France, did the same for War3, I've been a fan since the firsts days of Diablo and spent countless night on Starcraft (ty AOL btw...) but this is too much. It's just stupid, It won't solve the cheating problems, it's just to make hacking the game harder, but by doing so you're also making your potential customers more likely to want to hack the game.

  You're making the same mistake as the music industry has. Making CD more and more expensive and more and more protected, forgettting that it takes only ONE successfull hack to f*ck you up, when it takes millions of satisfied customer to BUY your game.

I *want* to be able to cheat

[Anonymous Coward]

I am only playing single player game. I don't care about achievement, i don't care about auction. once I finished the game on normal difficulty, I don't do it on hard "normally" I just cheat to short cut the time needed to level. All those anti cheat scheme : well they are saying "sorry pal, we will cut the enjoyment you get of the game by half". Fine. by me. that also means the value is cut by half, and i will *NOT* buy the game until it is in the bin at half price. *shrug*.

damn shame...

[Kaitiff]

Diablo was the game I introduced my son to computer games, and he's a huge fan of the series. He's 20 now, but he and I still like to get together and play games once in a while. He's 20 now but still living at home so he can finish his degree and I was looking forward to playing this OFFLINE with him, together. Neither of us ever really got into the online BS. Sure, there are some games we play online but invariably we both find the part we dislike the most is having to deal with the e-p33n jackasses online. I really don't feel the need to stroke someones ego because they completed the game 27 times before it hit retail and can do most of the levels while pulling their pud and watching kiddie pr0n. My son might very well buy it, but if I have to be connected to play, I may very well pass until it's cracked/hacked etc. the game devs have every right to screw up their product any way they see fit.. and I have every right to not buy their crap if I don't like it.

If there is single-player at all, NO

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes sense to avoid cheating if you are playing multiplayer, and there are plenty of games that require a connection to servers in order to ensure that everything is okay (e.g., in Valve's Steam). However, they can have an "offline" mode to handle both situations where you specifically don't want or can not connect due to where the player is, and to deal with situations where *inevitably* servers go down or connection is lost for some technical reason. What you do in that situation if you are worried about the integrity of a trade system is revert to the default or the latest weapons/gear loadout for the player and/or prevent whatever activity requires the connection to be there. In other words, degrade the stuff dependent on the connection, but leave everything else in the game intact.

Maybe the trade system is vital for what they have planned, but people aren't there exclusively to trade stuff. They are there to play the game. Saying "you can't do X unless you are connected". People understand that as a technical requirement. Saying you can't play at all, especially single-player, is stupid.

Wave of the Future

[oakwine]

Those who cannot have a continuous internet connection lose out big, no doubt of it. Only solution for them is to play older games. More and more games will use the client / server model. This is the model that has been in use in MMO for many years. It works, it has many benefits; it will thus become the standard for many game publishers. Ubisoft's new Conflux model is a compromise example. For instance, it will be possible to play Heroes of Might and Magic VI without and an internet connection. But there are so many advantages to Conflux that everyone will want to use it. I approve of the Diablo III always online model. If you play WoW you already know the drill. Again, sympathy for those who do not have a constant internet connection, but older games will be the solution. Heck, half my gaming time is on older games, Good Old Games (GoG), and being forced to play those can turn out to be a very happy outcome!

Time to say goodbye to Diablo

[dokc]

I enjoyed Diablo I, bought 2 LoD to play in the LAN, played it last year again from beginning, but I decided not to buy D3. First of all because they didn't created a Linux client (piece of cake for a OpenGL game wit already existing Mac client, but I suppose it will be playable under Wine) and now especially because of this always online crap. I never play MMO, I don't have time for it, and I don't want to be bullied by people actually living in BattleNet. I just want to play Single player sometimes and local LAN with friends.
Sorry Blizzard, but you will not get money from me this time.

Re:Time to say goodbye to Diablo

[Ractive]

Yeah same here, I'm a geek, I'm not social in real life nor in games, I want to play single player. I'd guess the games market is a place where people like me is fairly common but still they market most games for their online perks... but what do I know about marketing anyway. Funny thing is that you will be able to get a pirated version that works perfectly well for single player (starcraft II anyone?) and with this policy they are only encouraging this, when there's proof that there can be nicer yet profitable ways to sell games.

Re:Time to say goodbye to Diablo

[dokc]

I can confirm for Starcraft II. Hell of a trouble to get it running, and then finally succeeded using "Internet version". The good point is that the original will never be scratched.

MMO confusion

[InspectorGadget]

I think Blizzard seem to be undecided about whether Diablo 3 is a single player game with multiplayer elements or an MMO that you can play single player. If they made the decision one way or the other, or released two versions, the outrage would never have come up.

bye bye, then...

[polle404]

No singleplayer offline?
no money from me, then...
I don't really have a lack of connection options, I work for an ISP, I have broadband, I have 3G dongle I can use in my laptop, I even have a 'Droid phone i can get data through, should i have forgotten my 3G dongle...
Heck, in about a 1/3 of the commuter trains there's free wifi!

Don't change a thing.
Blizzard's bad gamedesign/need to snoop on my gaming sessions/me finding myself in an area without coverage is going to ensure that i will 'vote with my dollar' so to speak, and my vote goes to the company that makes a game playable for me, where ever I am.

If I choose to do a 'Kaczynski' and do my singleplayer gaming from a remote cabin in Wisconsin, it's my choice, not Blizzards.

Re:bye bye, then...

[Anonymous Coward]

DHS visit in 3...2...1...

Re:bye bye, then...

[madeye the younger]

Seconded. No single player offline, no sale. First opportunity I get to buy an offline version will get my money, legal or otherwise.

Your move, Blizzard.

Re:bye bye, then...

[Anonymous Coward]

If I choose to do a 'Kaczynski' and do my singleplayer gaming from a remote cabin in Wisconsin, it's my choice, not Blizzards.

I thought doing a 'Kaczynski' involved mailing bombs, not just isolation. At least you don't have my address.

Re:bye bye, then...

[Anonymous Coward]

After not having a connection for a week, I cant really consider buying this. It would literally be a cardboard box with a coaster I purchased.

Re:bye bye, then...

[RivenAleem]

"If I choose to do a 'Kaczynski' and do my singleplayer gaming from a remote cabin in Wisconsin, it's my choice, not Blizzards."

Umm, it is their choice. Didn't you read any of the previous articles? You know, the ones where they made and told us they made the choice. It's their game, so yes they can force anyone who wishes to play it, play it with an internet connection.

The ONLY (legal) choice you have, is to buy or not to buy.

I'm going to buy it. I'm going to play it with internet connection on. I'm going to be happy in the knowledge that those I'm playing with/against or buying/selling items with will be doing it without cheating.

Re:bye bye, then...

[Anonymous Coward]

If I choose to do a 'Kaczynski' and do my singleplayer gaming from a remote cabin in Wisconsin, it's my choice, not Blizzards.

I don't think the thing Ted Kaczynsji was known for was playing video games in a cabin out in the woods.

Just sayin'

Re:bye bye, then...

[Anonymous Coward]

Due to lack of time I rarely buy games at all.I wisely chose for which I spend hard earned bucks and I will not support this kind of DRM. For having this though I will punish Blizzard by completely leaving out this title. I'dll rather invest in the Humble Bundle ...

M. from Germany

Re:bye bye, then...

[Dripdry]

I'll chime in:

My girlfriend's (very old) laptop died earlier this year, prompting me to shop for a laptop for her, and I got one too, so we're actually quite new to modern gaming.

Now, we can take our gaming wherever we go, and we *do* like the outdoors. Camping trip? Hey honey, I'm bushed from rock climbing all day. Let's plug in at this electric site and play an hour of diablo 2. She's at a conference? Hey Honey, the wifi connection on the 28th floor of this hotel *sucks*, but let's play some multiplayer offline.

We're blown away that a company would be dim enough to have an always-online requirement. Even our broadband at home has connectivity issues (RCN isn't great) and we're IN THE MIDDLE OF CHICAGO. Seriously, Activision, we think you're a bunch of idiots and probably won't buy your game.

Reliability of current infrastruture sucks. Ubiquity of current infrastructure vs. where we actually might want to play isn't that great either. Blizzard, you could have sold another couple copies, and now you won't.

Re:bye bye, then...

[steelfood]

If I choose to do a 'Kaczynski'

I don't think that means what you think it means.

Kaczynski is the guy who sent mail bombs to people he didn't like. So unless you're planning on sending Blizzard distasteful packages, I don't think that's who you want to compare yourself to.

I think you mean Fisher, as in Bobby Fisher, who disappeared into the wild after becoming the top rated player in the world. He's also a little out there, but fairly harmless if you're not facing him on the other side of a chess board.

Re:bye bye, then...

[Anonymous Coward]

I too, am not going to play this game, which is really too bad for me. But the unfortunate thing is, too few of us are willing to make that stand... Blizzard has already calculated that out. I know smart people in the IT field that basically are arguing on Blizzard's behalf. Something like "blah blah blah, it's not a big deal, don't pretend it is, blah blah blah." The younger generation is used to abuse and won't take a stand. Even Penny-Arcade, who's generally crude and "pro-user" doesn't care.

Re:bye bye, then...

[Ractive]

yes, that's the only legal choice, what are the options then, I wonder... sounds a lot like an oppressive regime, like one where not carrying your star on the chest was deemed ilegal

Re:bye bye, then...

[RivenAleem]

Thankfully we have moved on from the days where you were beaten and or killed for not playing Diablo 1&2.

Re:bye bye, then...

[molesdad]

"I'm going to buy it. I'm going to play it with internet connection on. I'm going to be happy in the knowledge that those I'm playing with/against or buying/selling items with will be doing it without cheating." Single player: playing against someone else is not single player its multi player.

Re:bye bye, then...

[Zinho]

I'm going to buy it. I'm going to play it with internet connection on. I'm going to be happy in the knowledge that those I'm playing with/against or buying/selling items with will be doing it without cheating.

What makes you think that there will be no cheating? The d2 ladder has been "always-on only" since the beginning, and there's still duping and bots there. Lots. I'm hoping that Blizzard will do better on their new flagship title than they have on its decade-old predecessor, but I'm under no illusion that such success will come because they removed a gameplay option that requires no extra resources (server connections, policing) on their part after the sale.

Re:bye bye, then...

[SleazyRidr]

He's referring to the 'living in a remote cabin in Wisconsin' aspect of Kaczynski's personality, rather than the mail-bombing part. Kaczynski being one of the examples often trotted out in the violent video games argument.

Re:bye bye, then...

[Darinbob]

It's their decision to make the game they way they want to. But once I buy it then it's my decision to decide how to play it. If that means breaking the DRM to do so or playing on a Mac or Linux box then that's my business and my right as long as I'm not breaking copyright (even if congress disagrees).

Re:bye bye, then...

[Anonymous Coward]

When you're at your remote cabin in Wisconsin, do you masturbate a lot?

Re:bye bye, then...

[hexagonc]

"If I choose to do a 'Kaczynski' and do my singleplayer gaming from a remote cabin in Wisconsin, it's my choice, not Blizzards."

Umm, it is their choice. Didn't you read any of the previous articles? You know, the ones where they made and told us they made the choice. It's their game, so yes they can force anyone who wishes to play it, play it with an internet connection.

The ONLY (legal) choice you have, is to buy or not to buy.

I'm going to buy it. I'm going to play it with internet connection on. I'm going to be happy in the knowledge that those I'm playing with/against or buying/selling items with will be doing it without cheating.

You clearly misread what parent was saying, even though you quoted the exact part in question. He said it was his choice -- not Blizzard's -- how he does his singleplayer gaming, which is absolutely correct. If Blizzard insists that his singleplayer experience involve an always-on connection, then he has every right to refuse to buy their game; he'll just play a different singleplayer game. There was nothing in his post to suggest he would pirate it instead.

Not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I store all my characters on B.NET in Diablo 2, so i can play with other people, trade gear between my chars and access my account from anywhere i want.
If i want to play singleplayer, i can just create a passworded game.

Who plays Diablo 2 offline???

I think most of the coming Diablo 3 players feel the same, and the "backlash" against always-connected in this case is very small.

Re:Not a problem

[heathen_01]

Who plays Diablo 2 offline???

Many many people.

Screw Actiblizzard, I'll pirate it!

[blackdew]

I'm sure there will be an offline-playable version within days, just like SC2, and i'll play it offline without stupid DRM, just like i did SC2. D3 was one of the games i expected to buy the moment it comes out, but this limitation (and RMT crap too) is a total deal breaker for me.

Re:Screw Actiblizzard, I'll pirate it!

[mwvdlee]

Assuming the only reason you won't buy this game is due to the always-online requirement; why not buy the original game, but install the "offline-playable" version?

Re:Screw Actiblizzard, I'll pirate it!

[Hatta]

That would be rewarding the developers for bad behavior.

Re:Screw Actiblizzard, I'll pirate it!

[mwvdlee]

There's also the option of not playing the game at all.
That too would not reward the developers for bad behaviour, nor would it withhold rewarding the developers for all the rest of their work.

Re:Screw Actiblizzard, I'll pirate it!

[Vaphell]

you are a criminal anyway so why pay for the privilege?
Besides, lots of such sales will be read as 'people will accept any shit our geniuses at Activision come up with' thus justifying even more dick moves.

Re:Screw Actiblizzard, I'll pirate it!

[Fallingcow]

Why pay for something you have to pirate to use the way you want to?

Won't someone think about...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Soldiers. When deployed internet access can be hard to come by (and is crappy when available). Always on might not fly well with them and plenty of folks in the military are rpg lovers!

Could you play it on a train?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could not, would not on a train.

Not buying it

[UbuntuniX]

Anyone played Command & Conquer 4? Disaster that ruined a great series. Requiring a constant connection for single player is idiotic.

Common, offline was for whining babies...

[Anonymous Coward]

Diablo 2 was meant to be played HC (I'm not considering toys without permadeath, like the lame WoW, as "games") and online.

Half of the fun in D2 was trading high-level hardcore items with other high-level hardcore characters.

Stop being cry-babies and come play the game the way it is actually fun and enjoyable. And, yes, losing a high-level hardcore char stuffed with amazing equipment/charms/etc. sucked but that's what made that game really stand above all the others.

WoW is a PoS compared to D2 HC. Never played that sh!t.

Re:Common, offline was for whining babies...

[Vaphell]

i played HC offline solo with the gear i found - i wouldn't do that on battle.net, lag spikes could kill my char and i didn't feel like it. I had quite a few 85+ lvl HC chars.

Selling the milk instead of the cow.

[jenningsthecat]

Power companies don't sell you generators, wind turbines, solar panels, etc., they sell you power. After all, why make a handful of sales to you when they can keep selling you power every day, ad infinitum?

The Web is evolving, (or devolving), into the same model, with games such as Diablo 3, other cloud services, OS's that need to 'phone home' to function, etc. Sure, ISP's have always enjoyed the benefits of this way of doing business, but now other businesses are finding similar ways to cash in.

I don't like it, (Get off my lawn, dammit!), but I foresee a time in the not-too-distant future when most computing devices will be not much more than expensive paperweights unless they have full-time 'net connectivity. Those of us who insist on our 'data autonomy' will be the survivalists of the Internet age, living in remote areas of the dataverse and not being full members of mainstream society. But, we'll also be the only ones with viable computing power when the intertubes fail...

What would be the point?

[ewrong]

Why would you play a game like Diablo offline?

Re:What would be the point?

[JohnnyBGod]

Erm... for fun? Why do you play any game? Diablo 1 and 2 were solid single player experiences, as well.

Re:What would be the point?

[AnttiV]

LAN?

Re:What would be the point?

[RivenAleem]

This.

I've played WoW for almost 6years now. I have, perhaps, twice had internet issues that stopped me playing.

Re:What would be the point?

[FirstNoel]

I'm an anti-social person, I hate people.

Keep your grubby multiplayer out of my pristine single player experience.

Re:What would be the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize that Diablo 1 was originally designed as a single player game, right?

Re:What would be the point?

[Almandine]

Because it's a single player game? If I wanted an online game, I'd just choose one of the many MMOs instead.

Re:What would be the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you play a game like Diablo offline?

Because there are a lot of people that like to enjoy games without dealing with the human filth that dominate Battle.net and other online games? Just sayin'

Re:What would be the point?

[AngryDeuce]

Because if I wanted to play an MMO I'd play an MMO?

No need to complain about the always on

[Anonymous Coward]

Within a day or two a pirated copy will still be available without the always on requirement and the only people who will get to enjoy full use of their game will be those who didn't have to pay for it and download it for free. Not that a pirate needs justification, but they certainly have some now!

Single player? LAN? Of course not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blizzard wants money and is following the typical anti-piracy bullshit that Activision thinks works so well. Blizzard's been in a downward trend ever since their most recent merger.

Ubisoft

[mwvdlee]

Slightly offtopic, but at the end of TFA: "Last month Ubisoft said its strategy had resulted in "a clear reduction in piracy of our titles which required a persistent online connection, and from that point of view the requirement is a success".".
Did Ubisoft also increase profit, or did it only reduce piracy?

Re:Ubisoft

[AngryDeuce]

Seeing the source, my money is on "neither".

More bullshit from a bullshit artist. It's an industry wide epidemic. Thank God for indie games and the rise of F2P...

Re:Ubisoft

[Anonymous Coward]

No data, I'm afraid, All I can offer is one anecdote. I bought several Ubisoft games. I really liked most of them. I stopped buying them, however, when their DRM became so intrusive it became more trouble than it was worth. I hate to see Blizzard follow the same path, but it sounds like it's too late. I bought three copies of D2 (my PC and copies for both of my kids' PCs). I don't plan to buy D3 after reading this.

Re:Ubisoft

[Dremth]

Exactly. And, WHY did it reduce piracy? Was it truly because of the highly restrictive DRM making it "harder" for pirates? Or was it because not even pirates decided the game was worth the trouble, let alone the average gamer? I know I certainly didn't (and won't) buy any Ubisoft games. And EA is next on my list of "publishers not to give money to."

Why would "offline" equal "cheater invasion"?

[AnttiV]

What I don't understand is, how exactly does "no always offline requirement" translate to "huge problems with cheaters". If you allow offline, LAN games, I don't have problems with cheaters. For one, it's offline, people can't just connect to it. Ergo, if someone on the game cheats, I KNOW them, they are actually in MY HOUSE. So I can just get off my chair and go punch the f*cker in the face. And drink his soda, most probably. For online servers, sure, require always-online connectivity. They really ARE always online so it doesn't matter. But for Single Player and LAN games? Always Online requirement does not make sense in any reasonable way. The least being cheater protection. A heavy baseball bat works a heck of a lot better than any DRM when it comes to offline gaming.

Re:Why would "offline" equal "cheater invasion"?

[AnttiV]

"no always ONLINE requirement".. of course. Apparently I can't spell.

Re:Why would "offline" equal "cheater invasion"?

[ildon]

Because an always-on connection means they can keep cheaters off THEIR servers, not YOUR server. It means they can try to hide some critical data on the server side to make it much more difficult to cheat, or bot, or dupe, or whatever, and anyone attempting to crack it is at least reverse engineering it blind instead of having their own copy of the blue print handed to them right on the disc for the purposes of single player/offline/LAN mode.

Re:Why would "offline" equal "cheater invasion"?

[PHCOSci]

I concur. Just posted something to this effect. Blizzard is not citing piracy as the primary reason for the always-on model. For the most part it's to stop the rampant abuse of bots and third-party programs that abuse the provided game software. It's a logical step, and one that will provide exceptional game security. It's an online game. Anyone playing it offline is doing it wrong. It's like playing WoW on a private server all by yourself. You can do it, but is it really fun, or meant to be played that way? I think Diablo III is simply being designed as an MMO Action Game. Makes sense. Always has been for the most part.

Well...

[CFBMoo1]

Easy enough, I'll not be purchasing Diablo 3 especially since Diablo 1 and 2 work pretty nicely under Wine. Also has anyone ever attempted to come up with a good open sourced game thats Diablo like so when D1 and D2 do stop working from creep it'll be a nice replacement?

Re:Well...

[McKing]

Torchlight isn't open source but it is a damn fine dungeon crawl.

Re:Well...

[Noughmad]

Has anyone ever attempted to come up with a good open sourced game thats Diablo like?

NetHack?

Re:Well...

[fishbowl]

Those who can understand this, already do. Those who don't are unlikely to ever understand.

Blizzard is not a gaming company anymore.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blizzard is a financial institution now. There is nothing "freaky" or "nerdy" or even creative about them anymore.

What is important is first and foremost: Cash, Shareholder Value, Cash

While cash is important, games are still games, they should not be a simple cash cow. As a customer we have to blame ourself for this kind of behaviour. They have become a "Gaming Superr Starr", who can show his fans the "finger" and they still adore him.

The only thing we can do to battle this kind of making business is to stop buying their products.

I am not into RTS, so I will not comment on those games. For me the last innovative game by Blizzard was Diabolo 1, which alas was but a copy of old hack and slash games, like all other Blizzard games. Good copies. Very good copies.

I work myself in the IT, that they want to tell us that the "always online" is a factor in how the money politics are driven is a total farce and a slap in the face.

So with best regards from Europa to Blizzard, I hope you go bankrupt.

I'll subscribe to Torchlight 2 dev's newsletter

[H0ek]

DNRTFA

Now the developer for Torchlight 2 has given a clear and measured response that I can literally buy in to. Blizzard simply believes they are protecting the customer. For most customers this may work just fine, but I apparently am not like "most customers." Regularly I make trips to the in-laws up in the most remote part of Idaho. My father-in-law still uses dialup for his infrequent E-bay purchases and cattle futures report. When I travel to my in-laws, this is precisely the environment where I need a long single-player campaign that does not need a constant on-line connection. The original Torchlight kept me sane and entertained for hours while I avoided conflict with "the other side" of the family. It seems this will also be true for Torchlight 2, thus I will very likely buy the game - simply to preserve what's left of my sanity.

Diablo 3, not so much. I'm not one to spend money on a second game when the first still needs to be thoroughly played.

Now, I'm pretty certain Blizzard does not care about my lonely little circumstance. That's fine by me, I don't care much about their game if it appears to be unusable to me. I just hope developers like Torchlight continue to provide an awesome alternative, otherwise my money will go unspent - at least until I am committed to the asylum. Then it will be spent for white coats and medication. O_o

H0ek

Re:I'll subscribe to Torchlight 2 dev's newsletter

[Hatta]

Blizzard simply believes they are protecting the customer.

You're not actually naive enough to believe that, are you? Blizzard simply believes they are protecting their bottom line, and fuck their customers if they have a problem with it.

Re:I'll subscribe to Torchlight 2 dev's newsletter

[RivenAleem]

I recommend you have a conversation with your in-laws. Explain to them that you do not like visiting them as it takes you away from your gaming addiction.

It is really surprising that Blizzard haven't figured out a way for you to be able to use their game to properly get your feelings across to your relatives.

Perhaps you should consider why it is you must fill every waking moment with something that takes you away from human contact.

Thankfully, though, Diablo III isn't the only game in the world. You should be fine playing it at home and finding an alternative method of shunning your in-laws with. I suggest you get a game you can play on your iPhone/Android device. This way you can sit right infront of them while playing, so your disdain for them can be made all the more obvious.

Re:I'll subscribe to Torchlight 2 dev's newsletter

[Anonymous Coward]

If his in-laws are anything like my parents I would recommend no one visit them ever. They are toxic personalities, and the best you can hope for in visiting with them is to be mildly suicidal after a couple of hours. Does that make me an anti-social asshole because I don't want to put up with that?

Re:I'll subscribe to Torchlight 2 dev's newsletter

[Anonymous Coward]

When you put words in someone else's mouth, you become a liar.

Re:I'll subscribe to Torchlight 2 dev's newsletter

[H0ek]

Blizzard simply believes they are protecting the customer.

You're not actually naive enough to believe that, are you? Blizzard simply believes they are protecting their bottom line, and fuck their customers if they have a problem with it.

I believe the developers actually want to make a good product. This would include an auction system where everyone is treated fairly. This also includes a character system that cannot be abused and where the honest players do not have to live in fear of encountering overbearing cheaters.

Now, you seem to be speaking of the marketeers. Sure, they see customers as money factories and not as people who want to play a nice game. Perhaps I am naive to think the developers might get the upper hand. As I am a developer I'd like to imagine that someone in the world is able to write a bit of code that the customer wants to use.

Most developers I know want to write a game that they would play. Most marketeers simply want enough money to buy that Ferrari they have their eye on. I'm on the side of the devs.

Re:I'll subscribe to Torchlight 2 dev's newsletter

[H0ek]

I recommend you have a conversation with your in-laws. Explain to them that you do not like visiting them as it takes you away from your gaming addiction.

Ahh, you sadly make a lot of assumptions that do you no justice. When my in-laws are around and not out doing the farm work, we generally do have very nice conversations. Yes, there are moments when I do not agree with their culture and way-of-life and they do not appreciate mine. The real issue is when they're not home, I generally have very little to occupy my time. This is where my gaming addiction (that's one assumption you made that I will shamefully admit) comes in handy, allowing me to pass the time while I wait for their return.

You may ask why don't I go out and help them. Well, I'm not familiar enough with riding horses to be useful with the cattle. I cannot run the heavy equipment they use to harvest their grain. Really, I am simply the chauffeur for my family so they can visit with Mom and Dad/Grandma and Grandpa. Once I'm there, I'm as useful as a bicycle to a fish.

It is really surprising that Blizzard haven't figured out a way for you to be able to use their game to properly get your feelings across to your relatives.

Perhaps they can provide a farm equipment simulator so that I can be more useful to my in-laws. I probably wouldn't buy it anyway, as I don't usually play the sim games. Besides, learning to drive a tractor via a sim game is much like learning to be a rock star by playing Guitar Hero. No one would take me seriously.

Perhaps you should consider why it is you must fill every waking moment with something that takes you away from human contact.

Perhaps because sometimes that human contact is not present, or because my very nature is to be socially inept and I have a very hard time overcoming that nature. As weak as they are, I have my excuses and I plan to stick to them.

Thankfully, though, Diablo III isn't the only game in the world. You should be fine playing it at home and finding an alternative method of shunning your in-laws with. I suggest you get a game you can play on your iPhone/Android device. This way you can sit right infront of them while playing, so your disdain for them can be made all the more obvious.

Again, you assume I find my in-law reprehensible. My level of respect for them exceed most people as they spend most of their lives out in the fields tending to their livelihood, plus they can serve a family meal that would feed a small nation. I would never avoid social contact during one of their meals. When I am around them we tend to argue politics and culture, but I understand them and they tolerate me. At times I need to step away from a conflict and cool down, which is one of the reasons I have Plants vs. Zombies on my tablet. Great diversionary tactic.

I'm sure you have a wonderful relationship with your in-laws. I just find you're overly defensive attitude a poor quality in a person.

Re:I'll subscribe to Torchlight 2 dev's newsletter

[mgiuca]

I find it ironic that Max Schaefer, who said those comments and develops Torchlight, was one of the two guys that originally created Diablo.

Interesting that Torchlight 2 will actually support multiplayer this time around!

Re:I'll subscribe to Torchlight 2 dev's newsletter

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you going to your in-laws to play a long single-player campaign? Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of visiting them? Hi, it took forever to get here and your ISP connection is slow! Mind if I tie up your phone line for my entire visit? Say, you're not going to make me eat with you, are you? Your daughter is a bad cook and she had to learn it from someone. Oh no she didn't come with, she said she had to a team fortress 2 tournament and couldn't make it. You want me to help milking what?

PS3

[Rik Sweeney]

Whatever, losers, I'm just going to get the PS3 version which won't require an internet connection.

"But how will you play it on the move?" I hear you cry. Easy, I also have a PSP so I can just leave my PS3 on and use remote play via the internet to...

shit.

Nobody seems to catch the other issue...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, having an internet connection requirement is lame. We get that. Doesn't really put that much of a damper on the actual game IMO, though LAN is sadly becoming more and more taboo.

My main concern is the stupid real-currency auction house. This game's spam is going to be unbearable. WoW was a subscription based gamed that fell victim of years and years of nearly un-counterable spam...In-game! I feel as if this move by Blizzard will somehow amplify a problem that was never really solved in the first place, by changing the entire incentive of the game. No longer do people want to play for fun, lore, or that feeling Vanilla WoW gave us back when a game wasn't catered to casuals. They will be even more tempted to play for the wrong reason of, "If I could just make $5 more bucks...". To me, seems like another method of "replay value" that is a disguised timesink element that really shouldn't be added to this type of game. Diablo was about exploration and grinding; sure, but the incentive was making your character better by the time you spent on them. This is already a timesink/replay method. We don't need money involved. It changes the incentive and doesn't bring anything to the table.

Uh... no. Just no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, so I can forgive a few things.

Buying virtual items with real money to use in online multiplayer? Fine, whatever. I don't like the idea as no one person should have the opportunity to pay to be better than someone else, but I never intended to seriously play D3 online with strangers.

Mods are prohibited in single player mode? ..... are you high? Fine, whatever. I never modded single player D2 for my own enjoyment, but game modding is a legit form of extending the life of a game and should always be taken seriously.

Always needing an internet connection to play the game, even single player? What, are you high again? First Ubisoft and now you guys? Just who lined your pockets with that color green? Yes, many people have broadband internet access, but you know.... not everyone does. To shut out people solely because they don't have a constant way to access your servers is.... you're friggin' jerks. Fine, whatever. I've been waiting to play this game as long as everyone else. I'll give it a shot.

HOWEVER, the one thing that really got me really freaking mad was the comment of "I want to play Diablo 3 on my laptop in a plane, but, well, there are other games to play for times like that."

EXCUSE ME????? Who the frak are you to tell me, them, EVERYONE, what kinds of games we should play and where we should play them? Say my grandparents don't have broadband and I want to play D3.... I can't? FUCK YOU.

I'll tell you what kinds of other games there are to play for times like that. NOT YOURS. I'm not spending my money on this drivel JUST BECAUSE you decided to say that kind of asshole thing.

Asshole.

Re:Uh... no. Just no.

[Midnight Thunder]

Yeah, I want to be free to play a game wherever I am, whether or not there is an internet connection around. I may be in the middle of nowhere, on a ship or a plane and if I can't play my game because it requires an internet connection for something that shouldn't technically need one, then I would be very annoyed.

I now have a dilemma, in that I want to buy the game, but do not want to reward them for the ass-holeish behaviour. That 'fixed' version is looking might tempting right now.

Blizzard read this

[equex]

If you think this is going to be another Diablo 1 or 2 or another Starcraft, forget it. Those games succeeded because they could be copied (remember, Starcraft had a Spawn install mode! More recent versions of the game has no CD check at all) and was played in every basement all over the world because you could invite friends over for LAN play, even on modest computers. In this way, a motherfucking lot of people that would otherwise not hear about the game, actually bought the game and spread the word. What you are doing now will surely get you some short term profit, but don't expect to make history. Don't forget, your company was built on epic win.

Blizzard doesn't care...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's unfortunately unfair, but most companies don't care about problems customers have if they're not in the majority of their target market. Unless you're part of a group that's large enough to make a significant financial impact on sales you're SOL. Most companies that want to stay in business apply some form of the Pareto principle. Meaning they will gladly ignore 20% of the customer base to please the other 80%.

Re:Blizzard doesn't care...

[Trilkin]

Which is how it should be. Blizzard figures that the casual, single player will end up playing Torchlight 2 thanks to its modability and flexibility while the more MMO and multiplayer-minded will want the security and structure of Diablo 3. The RMT system should tell you who Blizzard is marketing the game to primarily and the type of person that would take advantage of the RMT system is definitely not the type of person who lives in the boonies or who travels a lot and can only dedicated 15-20 minutes a day to D3. Diablo 3 is for the people who want to grind themselves retarded and occasionally compete with other players (primarily MMO players.) Torchlight 2 is for people who want to dick around and/or the flexibility to mod their game easily and create cool, new shit to dick around with (primarily casual gamers.)

John Doe in the middle of rural Nebraska is not Blizzard's target market. John McTravelocity is also not Blizzard's target market. People of either group that constantly sound off that they're voting with their dollars/"son, I am disappoint" are talking to nobody except themselves. Blizzard isn't listening to you because they know they probably weren't going to get a sale out of you anyway. The potential sales they do end up losing with this decision will be MORE than made up for in the flood of new sales from people actually interested in what they have to sell.

Again, to the people saying 'I'm just going to buy Torchlight 2' - Blizzard isn't trying to compete with Torchlight 2. Diablo 3 is designed for the person who liked playing Diablo 2 on Battle.net, not the person who liked playing it solely single player. Torchlight 2 is for those people. Blizzard is, instead, trying to compete with the Torchlight MMO (if it ever comes out) and Guild Wars 2. Their always-on requirement is probably less for piracy reasons and more for Warden reasons. Blizzard isn't stupid - they know well enough that any DRM they introduce will get cracked, but they also know cracking their games is essentially useless. The real lure of their games is the online play so to the people that would actually be genuinely interested in playing Diablo 3 the way it's being designed it doesn't impact them at all.

As far as people complaining about the inherent phoning home for heuristics and other shit - you really think that's being used to identify you? That Blizzard is putting names to mouse movements specifically to sell to government agencies so they can keep track of you? Really? You're that paranoid? No. That shit is being used for marketing and development purposes. They use it to see what game features are being used, how they're being used and how often they're being used. None of that information gets stored with a unique ID that connects you to your game playing habits. They don't even need it - they'll have your character file stored on their servers as well as your account info. Why the hell do they need anything else to identify you? Don't delude yourself. They care much less about who you are than you think they do.

As for me, I'm going to buy Diablo 3 and I'm going to play it and I'm likely going to enjoy it long enough to justify the price I paid for it and if anybody is looking for a more complicated or meaningful reason to justify the purchase of a video game... well, I don't know what to tell you.

Re:Blizzard doesn't care...

[Hatta]

John Doe in the middle of rural Nebraska is not Blizzard's target market. John McTravelocity is also not Blizzard's target market

Why not? There's not much to do in rural Nebraska but play video games. Same thing when you're stuck traveling. Our money is as good as anyone elses, so why doesn't Blizzard want it?

This is especially strange, because it wouldn't harm any of Blizzard's online customers if they released an offline version. If they sold an offline version that cannot interact in any way with the online version they would please a lot of people, sell a lot more games, and the whole thing would go away.

Re:Blizzard doesn't care...

[Trilkin]

The amount of money that it would probably end up costing to publish a completely separate, offline version would probably be greater than the money they'd get from customers. And it isn't that Blizzard doesn't want you money - they just don't care about your money if they think their current plan is better than one that would appease you. You're in the minority, but there are companies that cater to the minority as well. That's why Torchlight 2 exists. Torchlight 2 looks to be everything anybody who played D2 would want out of a game of its type. Diablo 3 just isn't that kind've game. It's a MMO in all, but the name.

Re:Blizzard doesn't care...

[Hatta]

The amount of money that it would probably end up costing to publish a completely separate, offline version would probably be greater than the money they'd get from customers

They don't have to put it in a separate box, or even on a separate disc. I certainly don't buy the argument that it would cost more to do this than what they'd get in return. The bad press they're getting from this decision will cost them more than the developer time it would take to rip the networking out of the game.

And it isn't that Blizzard doesn't want you money - they just don't care about your money if they think their current plan is better than one that would appease you.

But it's not. They could increase their profits at negligible cost to themselves by publishing an offline only version. Corporate greed cannot be an explanation for this situation. Only stupidity or malice are adequate explanations.

Re:Blizzard doesn't care...

[fishbowl]

Rural Nebraska is actually better connected than many suburban areas in more populous states. John Doe actually is in Blizzard's target market. He's not the one making noise about the company's policies or refusing to buy the game over some idealistic concern. Blizz doesn't really care about the people who *don't* buy the game. They measure revenue, growth and churn mostly in terms of Battle.Net subscriptions. As an ATVI stockholder, I can't actually claim to disagree with this approach, even though there's no way I'd be a customer. (Admittedly I do occasionally buy a WoW time card and play for a bit.)

Security?

[Anonymous Coward]

"they are sacrificing options and flexibility for security"

Right, because it is more secure to be online than off. I am not a gamer any more but I used to be. Not once was I ever concerned about security but I was concerned about options and flexibility. .

What about the other issue?

[Sphor]

Yeah, having an internet connection requirement is lame. We get that. Doesn't really put that much of a damper on the actual game IMO, though LAN is sadly becoming more and more taboo. My main concern is the stupid real-currency auction house. This game's spam is going to be unbearable. WoW was a subscription based gamed that fell victim of years and years of nearly un-counterable spam...In-game! I feel as if this move by Blizzard will somehow amplify a problem that was never really solved in the first place, by changing the entire incentive of the game. No longer do people want to play for fun, lore, or that feeling Vanilla WoW gave us back when a game wasn't catered to casuals. They will be even more tempted to play for the wrong reason of, "If I could just make $5 more bucks...". To me, seems like another method of "replay value" that is a disguised timesink element that really shouldn't be added to this type of game. Diablo was about exploration and grinding; sure, but the incentive was making your character better by the time you spent on them. This is already a timesink/replay method. We don't need money involved. It changes the incentive and doesn't bring anything to the table.

Single Players screwed! (NO JUSTIFICATION)

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets be clear, I think for multiplayer this makes absolute sense due to the sheer crowd numbers and competitive nature of Diablo/Starcraft. HOWEVER, there is absolutely NO justification to do this to single player. I really was looking forward to this game but instead I'll be waiting for a hacked version instead of spending my money.

You can disagree with my stance, but I refuse to pay a dime to companies that do this. Here are MY reasons.

1) In 5-10 years when their servers shut down how will you play the game?
2) There is no modding, so how long do you think the game will last? Surely not as long as diable 1 and 2 (both of which are still played and have tons of additional content created by modders. Did you know that?)
3) I cannot play this when I'm in a clean room (no internet connection) or on a plane (often), or on vacation and I don't want to pay $30 per night for a shitty internet connection thats unstable.

If they remove the requirement for internet connection for single player 99% of the user uproar will go away. Just like it did for Starcraft 2. If they don't they lose my business.

Planned obsolescence.

[Anonymous Coward]

This approach gives allows Blizzard to pull the plug on all Diablo 3 users whenever they feel like it. Makes it clear you aren't BUYING the game, only leasing it.

Re:Planned obsolescence.

[Trilkin]

Considering Diablo 1 and Diablo 2's servers are still up I don't know if this is that big of a worry. You're paying much more for essentially the same deal in a MMO and look at how many people play those. Maybe you should try another genre of game - this one doesn't seem to be for you if you're afraid of that sort've thing. Besides, by the time the game is truly obsolete, Blizzard's past behavior with this sort of thing suggests that the always-on DRM will be removed at some point if they intend on obsoleting the game. I doubt they'd make this decision if they didn't intend on supporting it for a long time to come, though.

cheat free?

[ericartman]

So a permanent connection will make the game cheat free? Why cheat when it will only take more cash to get what you want. Runaway inflation and taxes in the real world will kill this game in no time IMO. WoW seem to have done OK with the"rampant" cheating going on. Squeezing every penny, when your making billions, never works out well in the end.

Re:cheat free?

[Trilkin]

No game is cheat free. A permanent connection means Warden is constantly on, though, so any cheats you might be running (especially the type that alter packets or memory) will likely be detected at some point very shortly after you start using them.

"Runaway inflation and taxes in the real world will kill this game in no time IMO."

How do you figure that exactly? The RMT is an option, not a requirement.

"Squeezing every penny, when your making billions, never works out well in the end."

How is this 'squeezing every penny' when it probably costs more to develop the DRM than it'll end up recovering in potential sales? This game isn't being developed like Diablo 2. It's a MMO in all, but the name. Treat it like one and all of your questions answer themselves.

Re:cheat free?

[Trilkin]

Oh and before someone makes a comment about bots, Warden detects most of them. Blizzard just doesn't act on it because it doesn't care about them. See also: every MMO in existence.

Re:cheat free?

[Midnight Thunder]

If you are playing multi-player online, then I can understand the advantages of 'cheat free' checks. If you are playing in single-player mode, then a cheat is really not going to impact anyone else, unless you are sharing your scores.

Re:cheat free?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember the first time I played the original Diablo online. Someone popped into my game with at cheats on and one shoted me. He then proceeded to tell me that's why I should join his guild. I said to myself what? Why would I want to hang out with a bunch of assholes just to try to avoid being killed by assholes when I can just never play online again?

Worse than Starcraft II

[kungfugleek]

Starcraft II forces online activation, but you can play the single player campaign off-line (ie, if their server goes down, you can still play the game). For me, that wasn't great, but it was still a "buy" for me. Diablo III? Not so much. FTA:

This system functions essentially like an MMO, where if your connection is interrupted during a game you'll be dropped back out to the login screen. It differs from what Blizzard did with StarCraft II because though the Wings of Liberty required an initial online activation, the campaign could still be played in an offline mode.

Nope. Not for me. Too many other options (Torchlight 2, Guild Wars 2 (where forcing connection makes sense)) to make D3 attractive.

Lighten up Francis

[benengel]

Most of the outrage in this thread sounds a bit like this guy

http://videosift.com/video/Francis-takes-exception-to-Diablo-3

also relevant :)

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/8/8/

Blizzard consistently make some of the worlds most awesome games. If at some point they start churning out crap then I will start to look at moves like this with suspicion. Until that happens though I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt - they have definitely earned it.

Psychology and perception are important

[Anonymous Coward]

Much like the American police Blizzard is opting for prevention over enforcement. This has always seemed like a bad strategy to me. With prevention of illegal behavior you always have to worry about the continuing progression of complexity in the commission of the crimes. As you implement preventive rules and strategies, the criminals find new ways around them causing you to have to spend even more time and money. Whereas with enforcement, you punish the criminals as they commit the crimes. In a physical world with violent crime a mix of those two concepts is necessary to prevent some of the more heinous things like murder, drug trafficking, and rape, but in a software environment you are only protecting your own investment. The preventive measure does absolutely nothing for the people you sell to except take away freedoms. Taking away someone's freedoms makes them angry and causes a small subset to simply never purchase your software if they can help it. So what you end up with is a nasty catch-22 where you keep trying to protect your money, but because your customers get nothing from that protection except headaches more and more of them start to commit the crimes you are trying to prevent and pirate your games. When are the corporations going to start thinking about the measures they are attempting to take? The glut of piracy wasn't started by the game companies but I can see that its huge growth is definitely being spurred on by these DRM fiascoes. The has to be a tit for tat, you can't just take and expect that to be alright. You want always on connections, then you need to have some real reward for gamers to allow it without questioning.

Let the customer decide.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blizzard could just let the customer decide how they want to play the game by using profiles:

BattleNet profile
- user data stored on Blizzard servers
- option to play single-player or multi-player with the same profile.
- internet connection required to play

Local profile
- user data stored on customer's computer
- only allowed to play single-player
- internet connection only only required for updates/patches.

all about the $$

[SpinningCone]

It's really about the greed. the DRM is really *NOT* for piracy. honestly i dont think blizzard gives a flip about piracy, a major component of the game is online multiplayer. games like that have been hard to pirate back in the D2 days if your key wasn't legit bnet would kick you out. sure you could use a keygen for single player but online wouldn't accept the key.

this really stems from the micro trans shop. blizzard knows a lot of people like to start with single player to get a feel for a game before jumping in. they want you to be able to transition your SP character to a MP character and buy crap from their store to support that character.

personally i knew it was going to be like this last year when i didn't buy starcraft 2 because of their DRM bullshit. now i won't be buying D3. the saddest part is how completely unnecessary it is. they could easily secure a healthy online economy with old school cd keys and leave the single player alone and even offer lan or open bnet.

and offline SP isn't just about gaming in the middle of nowhere, i like to cheat in SP sometimes. i downloaded hacked lvl99 D2 characters just for shits in giggles an had a few hours fun obliterating the game and testing various builds to see which one i wanted to shoot for online.

Re:all about the $$

[Batmunk2000]

Blizzard is playing the role of a big-budget producer. If Blizzard had gone after Torchlight and built a strong off-line SP game, people would be complaining about how those "big" companies are being bullies to the little guys. They can't win no matter what they do. People need to put money toward products that fit themselves and stop whining. The marketplace is big enough for everyone and varies enough for many different flavors of games like this.

Re:all about the $$

[Anonymous Coward]

People won't do that, because complaining about DRM offline LAN etc gives them an excuse to pirate, even though the right thing to do is to simply not buy, pirate, or play the game at all

Pirating "because of" DRM/LAN/etc. is like going to a restaurant, finishing your meal, but then refuse to pay because the meal apparently wasn't good enough

Re:all about the $$

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's really about the greed. the DRM is really *NOT* for piracy."

I'm sorry but you're clueless, it is for both piracy and the whole 'microtransaction' bs of MMO's of buying virtual items. Many other games have similar DRM schemes (assassins creed 2 anyone?). This is not the first. They wouldn't put the stupid DRM online shit in the game if they didn't believe it had no effect.

Re:all about the $$

[Anonymous Coward]

People won't do that, because complaining about DRM offline LAN etc gives them an excuse to pirate,

This assumes that only pirates complain about DRM, which is so obviously and objectively false that it can only possibly be a lie.

even though the right thing to do is to simply not buy, pirate, or play the game at all

That's ONE right thing to do. Another would be to buy the game (used, preferably), "pirate" it with a crack, and play your legally owned game without the DRM nonsense.

They ask those of Windows too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which version of DirectX should they support? What driver versions? 64 or 32 bit? XP? Vista? 7?

What about the windowing system? The game doesn't use the windowing system, it draws fullscreen, and if you run in a window, you just get the window border, it's not interacting with the windowmanager.

And what about hardware support? Does Blizzard have to troubleshoot why your Fresh Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit doesn't get sound on your machine, but your friend who has XP 32 bit can run it perfectly. Think, do they actually provide support and the problem is with your Windows install?

Blizzard Can Blow Me

[Greyfox]

Actually all the big game publishers can blow me. I'm moving toward supporting smaller developers with much lower priced titles and games that enable collaborative creation of content in game. As highly polished as the offerings of the big game publishers are, there is really nothing all that creative that you can do in the worlds they create. It's all there to keep you clicking for meaningless rewards so they can keep milking you as a cash cow. Everything these days is just a front end to a downloadable content store where you pay real money for things that will disappear the moment you let your subscription lapse.

A working example of a flexible system

[ElusiveJoe]

...is Trackmania game series. You can play online or offline, you can upload your single-player records, or you can take part in live competition. However, there are roughly two game scores: one for offline and one for online.

So, Blizzard, stop this telling us bullshit about cheating and market and blah-blah-blah. The only thing you care about is money, by all means possible.

Confused by reactions

[Anonymous Coward]

The reaction to their decision really confuses me because everyone I knew and everyone I played with played / plays over BNET anyway. The single player part of this game is the multiplayer only you're playing by yourself. It's one thing if the game has no element to justify an online DRM component, but this is a mostly multiplayer / social game and I'm pretty sure it was the quick and easy online play that made D2 a big hit and not the local or LAN play. (I did LAN it up quite a bit on D2, but that was mostly because I was on dial up. With broadband today I'd just play online if at a friends house playing with them because I'd want to keep progressing that group of online characters.)

Epically STUPID.

[Anonymous Coward]

1) It's not needed.
2) How about not being on the Internet? There's locations where playing the game MIGHT just be happening- but now with the "always on" requirement even for the solo game it's either impractical or impossible. I know of someone (not me...don't typically do Windows games...) that will probably NOT be buying the game because she's out in the countryside where the Internet's something either from Hugues, WildBlue, Verizon, or AT&T and the service is hit or miss. Having the connection die and the game dying with it isn't going to go over well with her.

I'm often in the boonies with no internet but 3G

[Anonymous Coward]

So this article was immensely helpful, I just bought Torchlight and Torchlight 2. Some of us are in the fly-over states and can't always get access to always-on internet.

I'll probably buy Diablo III, but only when it hits that 'greatest hits' price - since there are lots of times that I'll be unable to play it.

Everyone In This Thread

[crow_t_robot]

Everyone in this thread that doesn't live in bumfuck, TX where the only XYZ store that sells ZYX product should write a letter to the company raging about how the store didn't open a franchise near them so they could buy that ZYX product. How dare that company not take your location into consideration when they built the building??!! The troops can't get to the store when they are deployed in Iraq!!!! HOW DARE THEY EXCLUDE THE TROOPS!!!!!!!

Re:Everyone In This Thread

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget: since ZYX product isn't giving me 100% satisfaction, a bunch of people think that means they can not only not buy product ZYX, they can also now just grab themselves a copy of ZYX free of charge, as if this is some infomercial where it's "full satisfaction or your money back, and you get to keep the product!"

Re:Everyone In This Thread

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more of a "fuck you, I'm going to pirate your game and play offline single player since you won't let me", since the company is basically saying "fuck you, you will buy our game and play it the way we tell you to". They don't deserve our money for the draconian bullshit they are pulling, but some of us have been waiting for eight fucking years for this game to come out and I'll be damned if I pay $50 or $60 to support this disgusting always-online bullshit, but I still want to play the game, so that's how that works out.

Cheat free economy?!?

[ReeceTarbert]

it seems that most of what they are doing is related to trying to keep a truly secure, cheat-free economy in Diablo III.

What's the point of a cheat free economy on a single player game? Because of the auction house? You pay with real money, no?

RT.

What's "offline" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't play Diablo 3 unless my computer's online? Why would I even want to use a computer that's not online? If my Internet goes down, I immmediately close the lid and go do something else (i.e. read) until it returns.

U.S. May Not Be The Major Target Audience?

[Dripdry]

Maybe Activision isn't targeting the U.S. as much anymore. Maybe they're targeting countries that actually have modern internet infrastructure.
It's beginning to happen with large companies: A majority of their revenue comes from overseas now. Why not game companies too?

Re:U.S. May Not Be The Major Target Audience?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you telling me that a country that comprises a whole 4% of a significantly wired world doesn't provide even 50% of the revenue to companies supplying software for that wired world? The end is nigh.

Play to money song

[Anonymous Coward]

Its all about GREED. They do not care about user accounts being hacked or if you are wanting a single player game they only want your money.

Now that its official and real world money is directly tied to user accounts, fraud will be rampant and Acitivision Blizzard will just keep rolling in the cash off of everyone's pain. It is in their best profit interests that you lose your account via getting hacked and have to purchase another one as more subscribers to their system means more money. Also don't forget Real_ID is lurking in the background tracking all those purchases and activity in their so called marketplace. Now we can also tack on identity theft as it is up for grabs as well.

As a community we all need to put our collective feet down and do not purchase this and do not warez it. Unless we send a strong message the rest of the business community will quickly follow suite and demand the online only system.

Maybe this massive polarity of prison system users vs warez users is impossible to avoid but I would hope we would give it one last try and fight for our consumer rights.

Typical ActiBlizzendi

[sstamps]

Ever since bnetd, Blizzard has been completely self-absorbed in their own stupidity when it comes to game design for their non-MMO products. There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why they can't both have an offline single-player game and an online multi-player game which is fully secure where they can have their goddamned RMT garbage. They could even support LAN gaming and alternate ladder server modes, and everyone would be happy.

Sure, you're not going to be able to take your SP/LAN characters into MMO/MP mode, but so what? If you want to play in MMO mode, then play in MMO mode. Don't try to force every possible play mode into MMO mode and disenfranchise a significant percentage of your player base.

and I don't want to hear the bullshit about the "but everyone will pirate it". NONE of this will prevent people from pirating it, or even running their own backend, just like what they did to bnetd did nothing to stop the development and proliferation of alternate ladder servers and pirating of WC3. It won't stop the modding community, because the modding community will find a way to make mods.

Ultimately, I don't care what they do. I haven't owned a Blizzard product in over a decade, and they will never get another penny of my money ever again anyway, so they can feel free to fuck over their "loyal" fans however much they like. What they can't do, however, is to piss down my back and tell me it's raining by attempting to pass off the bullshit that it is "better for everyone", or that it is "the only viable route for games going forward".

The more they tighten their grip, the more gamers (and profits) they will squeeze between their fingers.

Feedback

[ekc]

Where is the best place to send feedback to Blizzard about this?

Re:Feedback

[Kittenman]

Your shop. Don't buy it. Blizzard can (and probably will) ignore every other comment than the almighty $. Come to think of it after the tons of moola they made from WarCraft they can probably ignore the piddling $$ they're missing from disgruntled potential SC][ and D3 buyers.

You can thank the pirates for this

[llZENll]

Its about one thing and one thing only, piracy. There is a reason hardly any games are released on PC these days, even though the cheapest PCs outclass consoles by 10:1, piracy is much less on consoles than PCs. People steal, whine, and bitch about their god given right of able to buy games at whatever price they think is 'fair', or that there is no demo, or its not long enough, they are all excuses, if you don't want to buy the game then don't and shut the fuck up! By stealing the game you only push developers further to DRM, you only incrementally erode the very thing you want, you only fuck yourself over in the long run. With the mob though there is only one outcome, which we are almost to, people steal, make excuses, and developers are pushed to the only thing that can truly prevent DRM, online game components for very single game released. Hell even as a single man indie dev I am going to be putting online components in my games in the future, you simply cannot sell anything without them, I see my games stolen by a 100:1 to 10,000:1 ratio, it doesn't matter how cheap they are, how long the demo is, or if there is no DRM at all. People steal because everyone does it, its easy to do, and there are no direct consequences to themselves.

Re:You can thank the pirates for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, abused women are at blame for the abuse they suffer, they drove their men to do it, it's really their fault, if you feel somebody might have wronged you it absolves you of all responsibility for your actions, commas are a great way to separate sentences and ideas, typing like this would make a normal person look stupid, it's not such a big deal though if your arguments are even stupider because it just gets lost in the noise.

Jesus, that's way harder than just typing intelligently. Where is it that people are learning to do that? Oh, and by the way, you should probably keep the blatant obvious lies about piracy out of your comments, because they make it clear that you're willing to lie to make a point and that makes everything that you say suspect. You have no idea how much your games are stolen, because there's no way to gather those statistics. You're just making up numbers to try to prove your point. Too bad that they're doing the exact opposite. Of course, given that you're willing to lie so obviously about that, I'm forced to assume that you're lying about being a game developer as well. The fact that you type like an eight year old isn't helping your case there, either.

Don't pretend like it's going to affect your life

[Anonymous Coward]

In any reasonable way at least.
It's not like we're not gonna have a crack for it 24hs after the release.
Heck, maybe even before the release.

HAHAHAHAHA!

[Chas]

Blizzard exec Robert Bridenbecker said he was surprised by the outrage at the online requirement

Then he's lying or he's had his head shoved up his ass for the last 5-10 years. The response to "always on" DRM has been almost universally negative. It indicates just how out of touch these guys are with the market and their potential customers.

"it really is just the nature of how things are going, the nature of the industry. When you look at everything you get by having that persistent connection on the servers, you cannot ignore the power and the draw of that."

Yup. You get a game who's very playability depends on a fragile authentication system that may not always be there. If either side has any connectivity or stability problems *POOF* no game! You have a customer that is completely unable to play the game they paid for. Bravo! Bravo! Monetizing downtime!

Some other developers came out in support of the scheme; id Software's Tim Willits said always-on would be "better for everybody" in the end.

HOW? Because it kills the secondary market? How is being absolutely dependent on an auth server EVEN FOR SINGLE PLAYER MODE good for the consumer? How is being unable to resell old games good for the consumer? What Timmy is saying here is it's "better for everybody who's a game publisher".

Re:HAHAHAHAHA!

[spacecoyotefarva]

The response to "always on" DRM has been almost universally negative.

The response from hardcore gamers is negative. Average gamers (Actiblizzard's target audience, like it or not) don't know what DRM is, that it's in the game, or why they should care.

Re:HAHAHAHAHA!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would consider "hardcore" gamers are the ones who will play the game no matter how ridiculous the DRM is.

Yes, casuals don't know/don't care. If it turns out they lack the Internet connection, they just won't buy the game and not complain.

Pirates also don't care since they'll crack any DRM eventually (even the PS3 which is only protected by Sony threatening lawsuit... the moment Sony moves on from PS3 the hacks will flow in)

The people who care and complain the most are really just... well... people on the Internet who have the time to do so ;p

Re:HAHAHAHAHA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to get in the way of a good 2 minutes hate session, but you may want to be aware of some things just so your next rant is more factual.

Yup. You get a game who's very playability depends on a fragile authentication system that may not always be there. If either side has any connectivity or stability problems *POOF* no game! You have a customer that is completely unable to play the game they paid for. Bravo! Bravo! Monetizing downtime!

In StarCraft 2, if you are unable to connect to Battle.Net, you can play offline but you cannot get achievements. If you are playing single-player and lose your connection to Battle.Net, you receive a notice that achievements are unachievable until the connection is restored. At no time is there ever "poof, no game" or "unable to play the game they paid for."

It is an assumption on my part, but I would consider it a reasonable one, to say that the "always-on" requirement for D3 will be very similar to that from SC2, and as a player with an often-wobbly router, this has not been an issue for me.

Re:HAHAHAHAHA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Blizzard exec Robert Bridenbecker said he was surprised by the outrage at the online requirement

Then he's lying or he's had his head shoved up his ass for the last 5-10 years.

This is the part that bothers me the most about this whole thing. Nobody at Blizzard could be surprised by this reaction, because they GOT THE EXACT SAME REACTION WHEN THEY TRIED TO PULL THE SAME THING WITH STARCRAFT 2. The community got into a large enough uproar that eventually they gave in and allowed the campaign to be played in offline mode, which was frankly a complete no-brainer and also secured them some number of sales. I don't understand why they think this is a good idea.

I'm also pretty sure they're lying about never having thought about this whole scheme as disruptive DRM. It's too obvious for it to have never come up at any point. And even if we were to allow the obviously wrong conclusion that everybody has internet access all the time everywhere and anyone who isn't constantly connected is a heathen, what happens when somebody DDoSes Blizzard's server as happened with Ubisoft? Why am I not allowed to play my single player game in that circumstance?

Re:HAHAHAHAHA!

[Darinbob]

I don't doubt that many game execs do have their heads up their asses. But the fact is that you can have draconian measures in a game and the masses will still buy it because it's cool and they gotta have it. So they see huge sale numbers and are getting rave reviews (which they paid for) and are probably genuinely surprised that there are a handful of angry emails and blogs from the few holdouts who still oppose DRM.

Re:HAHAHAHAHA!

[Chas]

Nope. That's the point. The Always On DRM is also gating the single-player experience as well.

The latest infection of the Activision parasite

[RanceJustice]

Activision's business strategy started out appalling and has only gotten worse. Unfortunately, the same is true of games published under their umbrella and with their financial interests in mind. Blizzard, as a quasi-autonomous entity spent a great deal of time making great games with long-term plans, such as making a Mac client back when the Mac gamer populace was abysmally small. This investment ensured that those Mac users who did want to game or play a MMORPG, would have their product as the premiere option. I'm confident if ActiBlizz was running the show back in those days, the typical hyper-capitalist corrupt short-term plunder mindset would have executives saying "Why waste all those man hours making sure the game works on Macs? Look at the small marketshare - its all worthless artsy kids who don't play games".

While they've been running down this horrible road for awhile, Diablo takes a BIG step forward or rather, two of them. First of course, is the "always online" DRM. Though not the first to try, it has always gone horribly with the userbase (See: Ubisoft). The sheer arrogance of telling me that I can't play a game that has no technical reason to be online, without kneeling mouth open at their UDP Port, is bloody insulting. Its indicative of typical Western (definitely American) business that sees the customer as the enemy and that they are simply owed any money they may ask for, nomatter the product or conditions thereof. When the game industry found out "Hey, if we ALL sell a single weapon for $5, 3 maps for $15, and charge a $60 starting base price then it becomes normative", things got even worse - not a SINGLE major AAA publisher took the other route and said "You know what, we're going to give people a fantastic fucking experience at reasonable prices and no cash grabs, all items included, even cosmetic. If its enough content to be like the expansion packs we remember from the 90s, then we'll sell one of those" (and no, do not start with me about Valve. TF2 Hats and Portal 2 7.99 Bot Hipster Glasses + $2.99 unlockable emotes squarely disqualify them).

As others have mentioned, there are many people who for whatever reason, would play Diablo 3 offline. Maybe they want to hack characters and give themselves unlimited stats? Maybe they want to dupe items for their LAN game and use other cheats? Maybe they just don't like playing with others due to maturity issues with the populace? Perhaps they travel a lot for work, or have insufficient connectivity for another reason? It shouldn't be up to Activision to dictate that all these people, for no technical reason, shouldn't be able to play the game they installed. Starcraft II started a backlash that at least allowed people to play offline modes as a "guest", but sadly lacks true LAN play as well. Diablo 3's dev team should have learned from this. People are still playing the original Starcraft and Diablo II, and they do so in a variety of ways that will be impossible under Diablo 3's connectivity requirements. This arrogance should not be rewarded, and I hope that there is enough pre-launch backlash to change the issue (see: Real ID full name display on forums). Sadly, I don't have the confidence that at launch enough people will abstain from buying to make a difference, but it would be a welcome sight.

The second issue is possibly far worse and exemplifies greed at some of its most blatant - the Real Money Transfer (RMT) Auction System in Diablo 3. While RMT has always been an issue with online games that require currency to acquire special items in amounts that are inconvenient for players who refuse to grind, it has always been relegated to a Chinese-controlled black market of sorts. Sometimes the currency and items were duped, came from hacked accounts, or were otherwise against the TOS. Even that acquired by electronic sweatshop workers was considered a breach of TOS to make in-game currency have real-world value. While in the East there are many "Item Shop" MMOs that lack any sort of subscription or client fee,

US Centric

[LS]

I live and work in China and also travel to other countries quite a bit, and frequently have no internet connection. I've found that after a couple days with no net, none of my steam games work anymore until I connect again. Total bullshit, as those are the times is most likely play. I cant work without internet, and now I cant play?!

Re:US Centric

[subanark]

If they make this like WoW, China will have lots of internet cafes that will be set up with this game.

-.- Subject

[Quiet_Desperation]

it really is just the nature of how things are going, the nature of the industry

"Some of my best friends have DRM."

Re:-.- Subject

[Dan667]

sounds like an STD

Re:-.- Subject

[Quiet_Desperation]

A good analogy, actually.

Simple Solution - Separate Characters

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't Blizzard keep multi-player characters online on the server and single player characters stored locally on the users PC.
No persistent connection needed. I really don't plan on wasting money on single player weapons and accessories.
I would consider it for my online character.

Just keep separate characters and drop the always connected DRM.

I want more than ten characters!

[LambdaWolf]

I'm surprised that more people aren't complaining about the limit on purely-offline, single-player characters. (I.e., you can't have any, and can have only ten online characters at a time, even if they never see any multiplayer.) It's enough to keep me from buying the game. I'm a chronic altitis sufferer and I won't be able to relax and enjoy the game if I know I'm tapping a finite resource when I click the "New Game" button. Even if the game is good—especially if it's good—I'd rather avoid the temptation to get invested and be all the more be frustrated when I eventually hit the ten-character limit. Better to just play Diablo II and Torchlight instead.

And by the way, the game will still be cracked.

Re:I want more than ten characters!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised that more people aren't complaining about the limit on purely-offline, single-player characters. (I.e., you can't have any, and can have only ten online characters at a time, even if they never see any multiplayer.) It's enough to keep me from buying the game. I'm a chronic altitis sufferer and I won't be able to relax and enjoy the game if I know I'm tapping a finite resource when I click the "New Game" button. Even if the game is good—especially if it's good—I'd rather avoid the temptation to get invested and be all the more be frustrated when I eventually hit the ten-character limit. Better to just play Diablo II and Torchlight instead.

And by the way, the game will still be cracked.

You do know that there's no point in having more than 10 characters. There are 5 classes and 2 sexes for each.

They removed the talent trees in D3, so once you have a Wizard/Monk/etc, there's no reason to roll a new one.

Re:I want more than ten characters!

[LambdaWolf]

I think it's up to me whether there's a point. What if I just enjoy the gaming experience of leveling a character up from a blank slate?

Re:I want more than ten characters!

[AlamedaStone]

I'm a chronic altitis sufferer

My name is Alemedastone, and I am an altaholic. I just can't get enough altohol.

When will WoW allow additional character slots? WHEN!? I'll be good! I'll buy BOTH bliz store mounts, I promise!

Development

[samsonaod]

It seems that from here out a games development cycle will not have finished until the pirate copy has been released.

This isn't about DRM

[subanark]

This is about social networks. They might lose a good chunk of people that want to play offline, but at the same time they will gain a lot of people who would prefer to play offline, but will play online if it is the only option. By getting people to play online, you get them to continue to play online as it is fundamentally more completive. No one wants to compare their progress or scores to others when the top 5% of the leader board is filled with cheaters, which will happen without a strong verification system. The more people compete, the more opportunities Blizzard has to sell these people more products. And people are far more willing to pay for that +5 bunny of cuteness if they can show it off to their friends than they would be if it was simply DLC (despite having a system from trading item for real money, I don't think Blizzard will sell anything directly that is obtainable in the game itself). As far as the DRM goes, the icing on the cake, pirating this when its online only will be really, really hard. All the AI code will be on the servers and trying to recreate that will be a daunting task. Also given the fact they will probably have regular updates and new challenges, like an MMO, pirates will never have anything as current, in working order, as what is online.

ROFLMAO

[Anonymous Coward]

"...cheat-free economy in Diablo III..."

I was wrecked with such guffaws that in addition to rolling to and fro on the floor, my posterior separated itself from my body.

There is no such thing as "cheat-free" in online games. There will be Chinese farmers there quicker than a pizza would disappear at a weight-watcher's convention.

This will not stop cheating.

[Anonymous Coward]

People can't cheat online games? Say it ain't so!?? This is bullshit. It may stop rampant item duplication and other obvious cheating, but this WILL not stop cheating entirely. People cheat in MMO's all the time. This is not a reasonable explanation.

Technical advantages of the always-on game design

[PHCOSci]

It has been stated by Blizzard, though infrequently cited by anyone on either side of the always on arguement, that MANY of the Diablo III resources will be hosted exclusively server-side. I assume this is being done to limit access of important game code from third-party program designers. Diablo II and World of Warcraft did not sufficiently shield the coding and packet-transfer mechanics to completely eliminate "botting" and software assisted gameplay. While the "OMG DRM, MUST BE FOR STOPPING PIRATING!" argument is being thrown around, the official commentary from Blizzard has never indicated this was the primary reason for the always-online game design choice. In sum, I think the OA design choice was to limit abuse and automation of the game system - not to inhibit illegal copy use. For the incredible minority of vocal anonymous individuals indicating (or fabricating) their perpetual lack of internet access via online forums; sorry? Individuals with computers below the minimum specs to play certain games, via your logic, should be able to establish a similar argument. My laptop can't play Crisis. The developers need to regear their approach to game design to allow my 1.5GHz processor with stock graphics card to play this game. I find that claim unreasonable. I find the "no internet" claim also unreasonable - especially when I read it online.

The direction the industry is going

[Anonymous Coward]

This "direction the industry is going" only works as justification if the market will bear the shift.

If people refuse to buy games because of this direction, then the industry will go in a different direction.

If people buy it anyway, then it's fine. The whiners can whine alone.

Piracy is the cause of this

[Smigh]

This doesn't really bother me too much but I don't buy any of those excuses to require the internet all the time.

Protecting the game's economy? That does not require this feature. Diablo 2 already did that. Basically it separated players in two worlds, one where they guarantee fairness but you need to be connected all the time, and another where everything goes and you could use those characters offline. This seems like a reasonable position that has the best of both worlds with no negative consequences so taking away the offline part is not an improvement in any perspective you could use. This is obviously a downgrade that can only be explained by lack of time (or willingness to make an extra effort for those who used that feature) or it's about piracy, which is ok but I'd rather if they'd just admit it instead of saying that they're doing it because it's "the way things are going" and making it sound like an improvement.

I said this didn't bother me because I ended up playing single player connected to Battle.Net all the time so that I could do fair PvP or trading. However, this is a limitation that I have put myself into because I understood the advantages and even though I almost didn't use much offline single player, I appreciate the choice.

Overreact much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile at Blizzard, D3 still sells shit tons of copies. Nothing to see here.

So much for travelling

[weatherwax]

I have a notebook. It goes with me everywhere. So do my games.

Dragon Age: Origins is annoying enough, having to have the CD, and being denied access to "bonus features" if I can't be online, but I can live with that - if I'm careful, and don't end up relying on "bonus features" on any key game save. But always-online simply means I won't buy the game, because it's useless to me. I'll be damned if I have to buy a 3G card or pay for airport / airline wifi just to play games while travelling. And internationally - no effing way.

Yeah, obviously I'm not part of the target demographic. It's a long time since I was 20, and I don't spend the evenings holed up in my room in my mom's house. But I'd have thought notebook-toting professionals weren't an insignificant group.

How to alienate potential customers in 1 easy step

[acwnh]

I own both Diablo and Diablo II (and still play them often), but have never had the desire to play online. It sounds like I won't own a copy of Diablo 3 because I am still not interested in playing online. The PHB's at Blizzard can talk all they want about an "enhanced" experience. If the enhancements are that good, then why not put them into the game itself? Here's a thought: Make the games reasonably priced and fun to play, and I'll bet that people actually pay for the game. Piracy will never be eliminated - look at how many people are robbed, mugged and murdered despite all of the laws and steps put into place to stop those crimes. Why penalize the folks who follow the rules so that you can stop a (very) small percentage of pirates?

In 30 years' time?

[bhassel]

I am more concerned about what happens to all these big-name games with online requirements in 30 years' time. When the online servers are gone, what will we be left with? It used to be that when you bought a game, you actually got a complete copy of the game itself, so people at least had something to try and preserve. Now, it seems the trend is to just give you an interface, with essential pieces of the game existing only on a server somewhere, to never be distributed...

Sten is naked again

[Anonymous Coward]

Every game with an always connected requirement has suffered from connectivity related problems. The last one I suffered through was Dragon Age, which didn't really require an always on connection except for the "free" DLC. Of course this resulted in randomly not being able to connect to the server and disappearing dragon armor.

Too bad, I had been looking forward to Diablo 3.

This isn't about cheating, directly...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but about supporting the auction house and, by extension, Blizzard's ability to protect the income stream from their cut of it.

In short, Diablo 3 is poised to turn into a microtransaction-based MMO for Blizzard as far as revenue goes, but with the additional up-front revenue from the direct sale of the game as well.

From the player's perspective, those costs (real and in terms of restricted usage rights) come without any associated benefit- there is no commitment to releasing additional content outside of expacs like you get in other games with that model.

I have no doubt that Blizzard / Activision will succeed with this and turn it into quite the monstrous pile of cash, but from a consumer perspective, it's a pretty poor deal. I'll wait for Torchlight 2.

In 15 years

[jcfandino]

We can still play Diablo 1 today. Will we be able to play this en 15 years?

Its about real money not in game currency

[Brainman Khan]

Blizzard will be putting an Auction House to buy Diablo III items other people have obtained for REAL money. Since REAL money is involved there has to be a way to authenticate the virtual goods that will be auctioned. You lose the ability to play offline but obtain the ability to sell for real currency worthwhile items you obtain. This is called a tradeoff. Blizzard is betting you will vote with your dollars that it’s a worthwhile trade off. Honestly in this case DRM/Authentication should be expected as you can merchandise your virtual goods for REAL currency. If you played competitive solitaire for cash you should not be offended by an online requirement to protect against cheating. Cheating in Diablo III would break a major design feature in the game. Is this “feature” another way to line blizzards coffers – SURE, but it could also be fun mining Diablo III for cash if you had the time. I’m not sure I will purchase Diablo III simply because I was lukewarm on I and didn’t play II, However being able to auction house items for real money is an interesting addition to non MMO gaming.
Offline: Torchlite I,II Diablo I,II others
Online: with real world currency options Diablo III
See you have choices

Re:Ruststorms

[Zinho]

Which is what exactly? Just let folks buy and sell items on third party websites because they had no way of stopping it? Have a periodic Ruststorm sweep where online players with dupes lose them? That was *real* effective let me tell you. *snort*

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand your argument. You seem to be saying that because Blizzard's policing efforts on D2 ladder failed that they should stop providing a service where policing isn't even offered (and none is expected). I see no way in which the one should cause the other.

Yes, duping was annoying. I hated buying a Mara's and having it disappear because it was duped. I hated even more how my server would crash mid-game because some duper wanted to exploit a server bug so he could sell me a duped Mara's. But this was happening on the battle.net ladder, despite Blizzard's policing efforts. If the game weren't 10 years old (meaning, I don't expect the company to put full resources into it; I'd rather that they finish the sequel) I'd have stopped playing, and I applaud every effort Blizzard did make to stop duping.

What I don't understand is how dropping the single-player and open battle.net components would make the situation any better. SP/open had no connection to the ladder whatsoever, nothing duped or hacked from them ever got to the ladder; so they were not responsible in any way for the economy dilution, gameplay imbalance, or server instability that was caused by duping on the ladder.

The big "economy" that Blizzard wants in on is, I think, things like the Forum Gold exchange on d2jsp.org. I thought it was brilliant how I could sell my ladder-only gear to non-ladder players after a reset and buy new gear for my new ladder character with the proceeds. There was no economy, though, for gear for open battle.net characters, because that market was infinitely inflated. Anyone who wanted anything there could download the d2 trainer software and make it for themselves, and pretty much that's the only way you'd ever see any reasonable quantity of high runes for a single player character. So, again, dropping the single-player mode and the open battle.net component would have no effect on the economy in the policed servers.

If Blizzard wants to stop people from trading on 3rd party websites then they need to offer a suitable in-game replacement, one that offers the same quality of service. Unless Blizzard is going to make it impossible to drop things on the ground as a way of giving them to others there will be no way to stop the d2jsp.org crowd from arranging trades among themselves on whatever terms they choose.

tl;dr version: single player in d2 didn't cause duping on the servers. Single player in d2 didn't cause 3rd party trading sites. Abandoning single player in d3 won't stop either from happening again.

It might work in theory, not in practice

[NickFortune]

The thinking is that pirates have a very short attention span. Most pirates are (theoretically) uninterested in playing games that are months old; if you can keep the game secure for a month or two, then the DRM has justified itself. The people who were sitting on the fence will purchase the game, rather than pirating it, and the people who would have been freeloading are kept off your servers, reducing your operating costs.

A theory? Then we ought to test it. Let's look at the torrents for Assassin's Creed. You might need to sort them by seeders.

Right now I see that AC2 has 495 seeders and 284 leechers. That's what? Nine months after the PC release? Doesn't sound like no interest to me.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, five months on has 2399 seeders right now, and 1175 leechers.

Also, there are other torrents being seeded and downloaded. Those are just the two best-seeded ones. And all this is in the face of always-on DRM.

Whoever came up with the theory didn't bother doing even the most basic research.

Re:It might work in theory, not in practice

[Mongoose Disciple]

The theory is that by 5 months (and, probably, a much shorter window, like 1 month), most of the people who will ever buy the game already have.

Re:It might work in theory, not in practice

[NickFortune]

The theory is that by 5 months (and, probably, a much shorter window, like 1 month), most of the people who will ever buy the game already have.

Which isn't the same thing as "most pirates have a short attention span", which was the point I was addressing.

Re:It might work in theory, not in practice

[tricorn]

The idea that by making it more difficult to pirate a game you'll get more people to buy it is flawed. Not many people who pirate stuff hardcore (as in, never buy the game, as opposed to those who try out a game, then buy it if they like it) will break down and buy it simply because they put in on-line validation requirements.

Those people who do try out a game using less-than-legitimate versions, then buy it if they like it, are much LESS likely to try it - and people who are inconvenienced by obtrusive DRM like this are also going to shy away from it in the future. Even though free Wi-Fi connections at restaurants, coffee shops, airports, etc. are becoming more widespread, there are still plenty of places where you might want to play something for a while without a network connection.

Anti-piracy measures affect sales of legitimate copies and proliferation of illegitimate copies. When they only decrease the latter, but don't increase the former, they're worthless, and if they negatively impact the legitimate sales, then they're worse than useless.

It's about something...

[Anonymous Coward]

If their real reason was preventing piracy, they would become competitive with piracy. They would not be trying to make the pirated product seem better, as they are now by adding DRM to the non-pirated version. You know it will be pirated anyway.

They said so for Assassin's Creed 2 too.

[unity100]

And we all saw what happened.

Re:They said so for Assassin's Creed 2 too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Having bought AC2, I can say that playing it was a pain in the ass because of the always-on requirement. I've had my gaming experience interrupted multiple times and even had hours of progress lost because checkpoints were not being saved. It's why I didn't buy the subsequent AC titles and will think hard before deciding whether to buy a game with an always-on requirement.

Anyone remember StarCraft II?

[uptaphunk]

Didn't we get the rant out of our system already with SC2?

Re:Anyone remember StarCraft II?

[trdrstv]

Yup and for some of us that means there's 2 games from Blizzard we didnt buy. I still LOVE starcraft 1, but won't buy anything with this kind of DRM. Hell even steam has an Offline mode so I can play games while on a plane.

Depends on the game.

[SanityInAnarchy]

I think what happened here is that Blizzard noticed how well WoW works with an "always on" mode -- no one complains about being forced to be "always on" for a game in which single player (even against bots) makes no sense. They're trying to do what I've always suggested, which is to provide enough incentive for having a legitimate online copy so that people want to buy the game and welcome the DRM mechanism.

What they're trying to do is get back to the days where a legitimate copy of the game is better than a pirated copy, or at least equal, rather than worse, and they're trying to get there without throwing out the DRM entirely.

Problem is, it's difficult to do this with a single-player game, and as you say, forcing people to be online rather than enticing them to be online is a different matter.

Steam lets me play offline for extended periods of time, yet I almost always play online, and I actually want a Steam version when it's available. Ok, I don't care as much about their community, but the social stuff is cool -- one click to go from an IM conversation with a friend to launching and joining a game they're in, and still have the IM conversation within easy reach. More than that, I like that when I bought a new machine, I booted it up, installed Steam, downloaded Portal 2, and it was ready to go with all my settings (keymappings, etc) and savegames.

I think that's the better route here -- if it's truly a single-player game, use the carrot rather than the stick. If it's truly a multi-player game, you can afford to be a lot more restrictive, though it'd still be cool if Starcraft 2 had a LAN mode -- maybe some sort of relatively-cheap blanket license for a LAN party, something like $5 per person for the weekend.

But then, I'm still operating under the assumption that GP is right, and that this was an attempt at justifying the DRM, rather than a feature people actually want.

Any game that's Steam-only DRM...

[SanityInAnarchy]

They've actually started warning us (sometimes) as one of the little badges or stats about a game, when it has additional DRM, like SecuROM. This stopped me from buying Arkham Asylum.

With Steam itself, though, it's not up to the game. Steam decides whether or not you can play offline, what your account is, etc. I don't think they'd have to patch the game -- just patch Steam itself to function offline, or to pretend to be online (so LAN play still works), and no need to patch games at all.

devil's advocate

[AxemRed]

I'm kind of reluctant to think that this ONLY has to do with cheating or auction house sales. There are several posts above discussing the merits of D2's approach, but D2 was exploited all to hell which is something that CAN'T happen in D3 if they plan on having a cash auction house.

Could it be that having so much of the game content stored on the PC and accessible offline made the game more vulnerable to exploitation somehow? Or could it at least be that designing the game so that it could be played both offline and securely online would not be feasible due to the amount of extra programming and maintenance involved in doing it? Or could it even be that, while feasible, the amount of time necessary to develop both an offline and a secure online version of D3 just wasn't deemed worth it when they looked at the percentage of players that they expected to play primarily offline?

I'm not saying that concern over piracy or a desire to push their cash auction house sales aren't possible motives for Blizzards decision. But there may have also been other factors involved.

Blizz policies

[fishbowl]

As a *customer*, things that Blizzard does often make me cringe. As a *stockholder* (ATVI), I am forced to acknowledge that those same decisions lead to a stronger bottom line (though not always reflected in the share price.) In the past year, Blizzard has done things that really drive me away as a customer. But it's hard to argue in the face of tripling and quadrupling of margins.

Bypass the Online Only

[Anonymous Coward]

It shouldn't to long for a few infamous groups to circumvent the Online Only.... The same thing happened with Assassins Creed and its gonna happen with this game too...

cheat free economy

[Anonymous Coward]

it seems that most of what they are doing is related to trying to keep a truly secure, cheat-free economy in Diablo III.

Diablo 2 online multiplayer suffered enormously from a huge amount of "hacked" items that were created in the single player game via trainers and other methods and then imported into online multiplayer through various exploits. The Torchlight 2 dev Max Schaefer was one of the guys behind Diablo 2 (There is even an in-game item named after him) so I believe that is the context behind his statement about keeping a cheat-free economy.

It won't be always online

[renrutal]

The issue is about cheating, Blizzard cannot verify if during your offline quests you didn't cheat, sou you can't go online with the same character and play with other players under the same rules.

The answer is simple, when you want to play offline, you can either start anew, or load a copy of your online character in cache in your computer. The Battle.net version of the character and its progress will remain frozen. When you choose to play online, you just continue with this online version; offline "tainted" characters won't ever be able to play in Battle.net.

This way you can have multiple "saved games" offline.

Benjamin Franklin said it...

[kanuac]

"Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither."

What happened to games==fun?

[sgt scrub]

Back in the day games were games, games were fun. The weren't the hyped up DRM ridden piles of shit that are out now. They need DRM to get as many $ in on first purchasers because 1 sometimes 2 are worth half the asking price and once everybody finds out the game is shit they wait for the crack. Here is an irony. About the time Diablo 2 came out (which btw imho sucked ass) I gave up on games -- windows psX xbox nada -- they all suck. RPG's became jobs. Do this, go there, do that, return here, rinse, repeat. FPS's became keyboard practice. Run to here, creep three steps, jump left, fire at those, find the explosives, toss the grenade... sigh. I thought AI would have improved. Todays RT & TB strategy games are proof nothing has been improved in at last 20 years.

regarding the quotes from some of the developers: Trying to chump users into wanting your DRM scheme is just fucking rude.

Emulated Servers

[jnpcl]

The reason there won't be offline Single-Player for Diablo III is simple: They would essentially be giving you the code used to run the Battle.net server.

In Single-Player, things like Loot generation, Mob spawning, Spell casting, etc. would be handled by the client.. the people who develop Emulated servers could peek into the code, and it wouldn't take much to start porting that over to an Online Multi-Player Server.

If Blizzard keeps all the server code on the server, especially with the obfuscation of opcodes like in WoW 4.x, then there's a much larger barrier to entry for the makers of Emulated servers.

However, if they have to embed that server code into the Single-Player client, it would be a matter of weeks (if not days) before people had functional Emulated servers up and running.

Re:Emulated Servers

[Anonymous Coward]

if thats the case, theres no way it could realistically be cracked very quickly.

the work thats been done on the WoW/SC2 (is there even a 3rd-party sc2 server yet?) emus might provide for a good framework, but theyd pretty much have to rewrite the whole client-server aspect (as stated: loot, mobs, spells).. it would be an empty world with no 'content'.

homebrew Battle.Net servers will rise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which of the Interblagospheretubenets do Blizzard Execs think I'm going to use DNS from?

Battle.Net points to someone, and I decide the Area Code when it's my DNS that is used first.

I distinctly remember when Blizzard sued BnetD into oblivion, and before that it was Blizzard suing FreeCraft for being able to use StarCraft data with an independent non-Blizzard engine to mix game-modes where it was Orc vs Terran and cool stuff like that.

Blizzard is such a failure, and the unemployed talent is already all over the internet field, that this is why patents are used to stifle competition because the industry in wake of collapsing governments mean that after the corporations have already built a tower of shame since astroturfing the homebrew computer science theme of things earlier is now where the tower will collapse for corporations.

I laugh at Blizzard, the same as I've laughed at MTV and Vivendi as a whole: and they are the same corporation now.

Blizzard is not the same group of 5 developers back in the 90's that make games fun. Now, Blizzard is directed by teams of Psychologists to make their games the least fulfilling and addictive so that the monthly revenue from addicts doesn't end. The first hint of these dirty tacticts are the various CONVENTIONS held around America where these addicts insult their family and heritage to boast of their life wasted into a video game like bringing their report card to their family refrigerator and exclaiming "look DAD AND MOM I got an F/F/F (aka 666)."

Always online..

[uutf]

Always online = always a laggy game, for me. My pings have always been 400ms+ to Blizz servers. Fuck that, it sucks

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can understand and accept that if I want to play multiplayer then I have to be online and use Battle.net. When am playing single player what is the motivation to be online constantly? If I want to buy something from the auction house then sure I will go online, but that shouldn't be the sole reason. There is no incentive for me to play a single-player game while connected to the internet. DRM authentication is not a valid excuse. I am willing to accept upon installation to connect and verify my game (to a degree) or to my Battle.net account if it allows me to connect with my friends etc, but if you don't incentivise then I cannot accept this restriction to my rights.

call it what it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

best description of why they're doing this, QUOTING:
You mustn’t play offline or goof around with your files or any other naughty business because they are endeavoring to transform your putative ownership into a revenue stream. (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2011/8/8/ )

DRM upsets paying customers? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I find odd is that people including Blizzard exec Robert Bridenbecker can feign ignorance to the fact that customers are (rightly) upset about restrictive and in fact PUNITIVE DRM. You mean to tell me that an exec of any gaming company has their head so far in the sand that this would come as a "surprise" to them? Where have they been for the last 20 years and really, if that's their level of understanding the issue WHY THE HELL ARE THEY STILL WORKING AS GAME COMPANY EXECS? Really, come on. NO ONE likes DRM - whether it's the idea or the implementation - it's the wrong approach entirely. It punishes paying customers with what often amounts to useless wastes of money (and time that you invest in a game you end up hating), and provides incentive for people to get "DRM Free" versions - that actually work as intended. How is this stopping "piracy"? How does this make sense? What paying customers have to do is stop PAYING. It might mean stop playing (the new games or not renewing your subscription to existing games) for maybe a year. That should drive profits far enough down that either software companies will come up with a different model, or at the very least, shake up the executives enough to the idea that this approach isn't working. At that point, feigning ignorance would be recognized for the disingenuine, hollow, insulting and pandering gesture that it truly is.

No Blizzard, This Isn't The Way Things Are Going

[Anonymous Coward]

EA loves always-on. In FIFA11 there's even another mode of the game you only can access by connecting to the EA servers. OK, that's fun. EA wasn't stupid enough to make single-player always-on though. If I don't have an internet connection I can still play single player.

Blizzard, there are a million games out there, including Diablo 2, that don't require your bullshit always-on scheme. Why would I waste my hard-earned cash on Diablo 3? *yawn* .

Will not purchase

[jimnorcal]

I made the same commitment not to buy SC2 because of the connection requirement and I have stuck to that commitment. This is just wrong for several reasons. 1) You can't play with the games internals like you can with a game that you install and can play without being restricted to blizzard's online jailhouse. This is exactly what this is like. Your game is imprisoned with a 24 hour a day guard rotation to keep watch on everything you do with the game. No mods to play and experiement with = no more in depth long term fun. I really enjoyed being able to install various mods into D1 and D2 and it looks like I'm going to be stuck playing those games forever since I will never see another release of Diablo otherwise. 2) What happens when blizzard dies? Don't think for one minute that it can't happen. How many large powerhouse game companies have we seen crash to the ground? So, in twelve years when something bad happens and blizzard crash and burns like so many of its predessors, what happens to our games? Well, they crash with Blizzard since you can't play the game without blizzard's DRM servers being up and running. Those servers costs money to run and keep online so if blizzard's cash that maintains these servers stops, so do our games. I don't want to take that risk of losing my $60+ investment some years down the road and never being able to play the game again. What a horrible thought indeed. I still play and very much enjoy Diablo 1 and Starcraft and they're old! I'm glad they don't require an online connection! How do we stand up against this? How do we tell Blizzard that we want our games to be OUR games; to do with what we please; to still be able to play them in thirty years; to not be so controlled all the time by corporate assholes who only have dollar signs in their eyes. What can we do? Well, we can not buy the games. That's they only way we can send a message becuase, obviously, complaining online does nothing but make the execs say "I'm surprised by so many complaining about the online requirement but this is the way it is and this is the way it shall forever be. Mwaaahahaha!". Fuckers!

cuz of this crap...

[paradive]

add me to the "won't be buying it" crowd. let's face it. they're just too lazy to add to add a "single-player mode" to the main menu.

How is having an online auction different than wha

[fervus]

North Corea is making money by selling WoW items, right? Why not everybody? http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/08/08/2129237/North-Korea-Accused-of-Hacking-Online-Games-For-Profit?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2FslashdotGames+(Slashdot%3A+Games)&utm_content=Google+Reader