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Diablo 3 Banhammer Dropped Just Before RMAH Goes Live
eldavojohn writes "One thing Diablo 3 has that many other games do not is a 'Real Money Auction House' (RMAH), which went live today for players with two factor authentication. Of course, mere hours before that, Blizzard publicly announced they would follow through on their promises. Accounts they have identified as cheaters and botters have been banned 'by the thousands.' No official number is out, but the news is indicating that as people get off of work and return home to their bot-wives and bot-kids they may find themselves without a valid Battle.net account (possibly tied to other games like SCII and WoW). Blizzard has also included many fixes to remove/dissuade many other exploits but if their past arcane attitude toward the 'gamers of the game' is any indication, thousands will be unhappy."
Its not a single player game. The loot is expressly designed with the idea that you will trade other people.
Good-bye
Check out Torchlight and, soon, Torchlight 2. The latter has an online multiplayer but you can play the singleplayer mode offline. And it's a fun game.
And that's a really that bad a thing, being constantly connected?
Yes, it's a really bad thing when their servers are overloaded and you can't play, or their servers are down for maintenance and you can't play, or someone hacks your account and gets you banned and you can't play, or they patch your favorite ability out of the game and you can't decide to skip the patch until you're ready to change classes, or your internet is out for any reason and you can't play, or you go to a LAN party that can't afford a major outside connection and you can't play, or you try to play a Hardcore character and you disconnect or lag out at a bad moment and die and lose your character, or, or, or...
There's a lot of reasons why it is a bad thing. The most notable reason was the First Week Launch Experience. Most people wanted to play solo anyway, but couldn't even do that due to the inadequate server capacity. The only reason that caused any problems at all was because you couldn't play in an off-line mode.
If this were an actual MMO, where the entire design is around having lots of players together, that would all be par for the course. This is an explicitly limited multiplayer experience that has no real need for the server connection at all, except for the DRM properties such a connection enforces, and an attempt to prevent some player-base fragmentation that I'd wager is not really going to have any notable effect in any case (those that would have played in offline/local modes aren't going to participate much in the extra features afforded by the always-on connection even though they're forced to be on the server where they are an option).
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
In the initial beta runs, they apparently shipped the server and client bundled together to run on the local machine, presumably because the server code was under development and in a constant state of flux. They stripped it back out fairly early on. But there's certainly no technical reason why someone with the sourcecode couldn't merge them together fairly easily.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face