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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
There aren't many things you can do to quiet an obnoxious, tantruming child. You can try hitting them to make them afraid of further pain, but some kids will just use that as an excuse to tantrum more and make the situation worse still. You can try appeasing them, but that just gives them incentive to continue their behavior. You can try meeting them half-way, but some of them don't understand how to compromise. They want it their way or the highway.
Now imagine it's a step-kid where you have even LESS power over them and constantly having their biological parents looking after them, but are being ineffective as parents. Your hands are tied there - there isn't a lot you can do if the child doesn't like you and won't cooperate so you do the best thing you can to try to appease it to make it shut up at least for the interim. Hopefully in a future encounter, his biological parents will intervene or he'll grow up a little.
OR... the car had just been finished having maintenance work on it and the person was driving it back to the compound in order to have it examined in case said maintenance screwed with the software somehow.
I really hate arguments like this because you act like it absolutely MUST happen. You can say the same thing about drunk drivers or a car failure of some sort in the middle of the freeway while you're doing 90-100mph or virtually any other reason there might an accident. A robotic car removes the possibility of human error which MORE than makes up for the increase in potential mechanical or electronic failures. It's a trade off for a substantially lower overall accident rate.
So, my answer to your question is 'the same family member that would've died to the guy driving drunk, head on with them at high speed,' I'd much rather take a possible glitch killing or mechanical failure killing me over someone else's bad judgment since I would hope a acceptable design allowed on the roads would be MUCH less likely to kill you than another person. People already do this with airplanes and look at that - FAR safer to travel in than a car.
Not sure if this is a troll, but Mark Hamill has been the Joker in the Animated Series since its inception and was also the Joker in Arkham Asylum and in the upcoming Arkham City (which is, supposedly, the last time he'll ever play the character.)
Rushed out the door a year early, still ended up in last place in worldwide sales.
This is the only point you're actually correct on and that's due to a lot of things that actually have nothing to do with the 360's hardware failure rate. The PS3's hardware failure rate isn't much better. I've personally gone through two of each and that's with moderate play. Between the 360 having no appeal in Japan due to the lack of third-party support from developers they cared about for the longest time and the region-locking scheme they had going on... the PS3 was more attractive to European nations because far fewer things were region locked and in a country where the PAL version of a game might come out after the next apocalypse, this means a lot to them... not to mention the large amount of organizations that bought PS3s for research purpose.
Worst console hardware ever created.
You mean worse than the Wii which is basically just a rebadged Gamecube? Worse than the Jaguar which was a clusterfuck that developers didn't want to be bothered with? Or are you talking about the actual physical qualities of the hardware? Most of their failures were due to poor soldering, not poor quality parts. I hate to tell you, but the hardware in your beloved Wii/PS3 is produced in most of the same factories as the 360's hardware.
Graphically destroyed by the PS3.
Wat? How? I've seen WAY more instances of games chugging on a PS3 or dropping frames than the 360. There isn't a great deal of difference between the Cell and the 360's processor, power wise... you're aware of that, right? You're aware of that scandal with IBM? You actually read that... right? The video cards on either system are also pretty much the same (one is ATI and the other is Nvidia.) The PS3's is clocked 50mhz higher... oh boy! The ONLY advantage the PS3 has over the 360 is the blu-ray drive for larger textures... and go pop in some of your bluray games and check how much they're really taking advantage of it. They CAN'T - the PS3 doesn't have enough memory for textures of that size without some awesome compression schemes going on.
Ended up a distant 2nd place last gen. Will end up last place this gen.
Maybe, but...
Lost some 4 billion dollars on the first Xbox. Lost around the same amount this gen.
You're so wrong it hurts. They started making a profit on the 360 way back in 2006. They've made about $8bil in gross revenue from it so far. That doesn't even count the amount of money they get from any Microsoft Game Studios published game. The Wii has made a larger profit because there was no real R&D involved in actually speccing out the system. The only R&D involved was in the motion control system which cost a great deal less than fully developing a new system entirely. This new Nintendo console coming out will probably show some huge losses at the beginning of its lifespan too - it looks like they're dumping a LOT of money into it. The first Xbox was a loss because it was very unwisely released while the PS2 was at its peak. There was absolutely no incentive for any third party developer to develop for them... until they got their killer app (Halo) anyway. They made it a point to beat Sony and Nintendo to the gate in the current generation and it's paid off tremendously for them.
Only in some fantasy world can anyone say the 360 has failed. It was EXTREMELY profitable and was the basis for several very lucrative franchises and will be the basis for others to come without a doubt.
And I'm not a Microsoft fanboy - I own all three current gen consoles and I own all three previous gen consoles as well. I find myself preferring certain games on the 360 and others on the PS3 (generally games that require disc swapping.) The Wii also has its own appeal and serves as a much better 'party' platform. Has some great games in its own right too. All three consoles were successes for all three companies. Sony had to work a hell of lot harder to get there, but once developers started figuring out how to work with the convoluted system they were given (with very little in the way of documentation initially, no less) good things started coming out of it. No one failed this generation. Sorry.
Jon Stewart tends to do it in ways that are critical of what Obama is doing rather than simple, unrelated non sequiturs. Republicans just go right for the insults without saying really why. It's not because they're republican, but rather, they're republican and he's a democrat and is simply insulted by most republicans of it rather than because of his policies. If it were 2004, it'd be the same thing in reverse, although maybe a bit more colorful and, in my opinion, more justified... but that's less party politics and more what Bush himself did.
It's politics - especially American politics; one side uses dumb insults for the opposite side regardless on what they're doings imply because hey aren't wearing the same color. The same side tends to be a bit more constructive in their criticism for their own, although there seems to be a LOT more fragmentation among the Republicans than the Democrats these days... not to say there haven't been plenty of Democrats throwing Obama under the bus, but it seems MUCH worse on the other side as far as keeping their shit together.
For the record, if it must be said, I am no fan of Obama. I think it's ineffective as a president. I don't think he's anymore a liar than the next politician. I believe he's been overwhelmed by the reality of the situation in Washington and has been forced to compromised because, as witnessed, his colleagues are willing to act like children just for the sheer fact they don't like the side of the aisle he's on... but that shouldn't come as a surprise to him. So much for willing to kick some asses, Obama=(
It's not really a rag on republicans, though (I don't really side with a party. I side with whoever I think would do the best job at the time.) It's more of an acknowledgment of 'if someone is making a dumb insult, it's probably the guy wearing the different colors.' That's how a good chunk of Americans treat politics - like it's football... and with even less respect for the other side sometimes.
Granted, it'll stop John Q. Idiot from getting your data, but if you actually care about data encryption/safety in the first place, John Q. Idiot probably isn't the person you're afraid of. In the real world, there are very few people who need truly secure phones considering that the majority of the data on them is their calendar reminding them to pick up their daughter from school, their contacts list and Angry Birds. A good number of people who claim they want that security generally think what they have on their phone is more important than it really is (or they don't want their wives/girlfriends to find out about the affair they're having.) Only a slim number of people actually need that much security on their phones... and they, wisely, use Blackberries.
It's not exactly hard to just change your passwords in the event your phone gets stolen and they have access to saved banking information (WHY DO YOU HAVE THAT SAVED ON A PHONE?!), Paypal information (more plausible) or Apple Store/Android Market information.
What is the color of the sky in your world where the 360 has been even considered close to a failure? Is there a big Sony or Nintendo logo made out of clouds there?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I'll give you two credit - you're not insulting each other as ACs.
I love legitimate theater!
Uh, Perfect World has items that are solely from the cash shop.
There is bad fanfiction depicting this event. Lots of it.
There aren't many things you can do to quiet an obnoxious, tantruming child. You can try hitting them to make them afraid of further pain, but some kids will just use that as an excuse to tantrum more and make the situation worse still. You can try appeasing them, but that just gives them incentive to continue their behavior. You can try meeting them half-way, but some of them don't understand how to compromise. They want it their way or the highway.
Now imagine it's a step-kid where you have even LESS power over them and constantly having their biological parents looking after them, but are being ineffective as parents. Your hands are tied there - there isn't a lot you can do if the child doesn't like you and won't cooperate so you do the best thing you can to try to appease it to make it shut up at least for the interim. Hopefully in a future encounter, his biological parents will intervene or he'll grow up a little.
Like Tempest Keep?
OR... the car had just been finished having maintenance work on it and the person was driving it back to the compound in order to have it examined in case said maintenance screwed with the software somehow.
Yo, dawg, we heard you like cheap mid-sized cars...
I really hate arguments like this because you act like it absolutely MUST happen. You can say the same thing about drunk drivers or a car failure of some sort in the middle of the freeway while you're doing 90-100mph or virtually any other reason there might an accident. A robotic car removes the possibility of human error which MORE than makes up for the increase in potential mechanical or electronic failures. It's a trade off for a substantially lower overall accident rate.
So, my answer to your question is 'the same family member that would've died to the guy driving drunk, head on with them at high speed,' I'd much rather take a possible glitch killing or mechanical failure killing me over someone else's bad judgment since I would hope a acceptable design allowed on the roads would be MUCH less likely to kill you than another person. People already do this with airplanes and look at that - FAR safer to travel in than a car.
I found the opposite once I got used to it.
Not sure if this is a troll, but Mark Hamill has been the Joker in the Animated Series since its inception and was also the Joker in Arkham Asylum and in the upcoming Arkham City (which is, supposedly, the last time he'll ever play the character.)
Someone's mad Notch is more successful than he is.
Rushed out the door a year early, still ended up in last place in worldwide sales.
This is the only point you're actually correct on and that's due to a lot of things that actually have nothing to do with the 360's hardware failure rate. The PS3's hardware failure rate isn't much better. I've personally gone through two of each and that's with moderate play. Between the 360 having no appeal in Japan due to the lack of third-party support from developers they cared about for the longest time and the region-locking scheme they had going on... the PS3 was more attractive to European nations because far fewer things were region locked and in a country where the PAL version of a game might come out after the next apocalypse, this means a lot to them... not to mention the large amount of organizations that bought PS3s for research purpose.
Worst console hardware ever created.
You mean worse than the Wii which is basically just a rebadged Gamecube? Worse than the Jaguar which was a clusterfuck that developers didn't want to be bothered with? Or are you talking about the actual physical qualities of the hardware? Most of their failures were due to poor soldering, not poor quality parts. I hate to tell you, but the hardware in your beloved Wii/PS3 is produced in most of the same factories as the 360's hardware.
Graphically destroyed by the PS3.
Wat? How? I've seen WAY more instances of games chugging on a PS3 or dropping frames than the 360. There isn't a great deal of difference between the Cell and the 360's processor, power wise... you're aware of that, right? You're aware of that scandal with IBM? You actually read that... right? The video cards on either system are also pretty much the same (one is ATI and the other is Nvidia.) The PS3's is clocked 50mhz higher... oh boy! The ONLY advantage the PS3 has over the 360 is the blu-ray drive for larger textures... and go pop in some of your bluray games and check how much they're really taking advantage of it. They CAN'T - the PS3 doesn't have enough memory for textures of that size without some awesome compression schemes going on.
Ended up a distant 2nd place last gen. Will end up last place this gen.
Maybe, but...
Lost some 4 billion dollars on the first Xbox. Lost around the same amount this gen.
You're so wrong it hurts. They started making a profit on the 360 way back in 2006. They've made about $8bil in gross revenue from it so far. That doesn't even count the amount of money they get from any Microsoft Game Studios published game. The Wii has made a larger profit because there was no real R&D involved in actually speccing out the system. The only R&D involved was in the motion control system which cost a great deal less than fully developing a new system entirely. This new Nintendo console coming out will probably show some huge losses at the beginning of its lifespan too - it looks like they're dumping a LOT of money into it. The first Xbox was a loss because it was very unwisely released while the PS2 was at its peak. There was absolutely no incentive for any third party developer to develop for them... until they got their killer app (Halo) anyway. They made it a point to beat Sony and Nintendo to the gate in the current generation and it's paid off tremendously for them.
Only in some fantasy world can anyone say the 360 has failed. It was EXTREMELY profitable and was the basis for several very lucrative franchises and will be the basis for others to come without a doubt.
And I'm not a Microsoft fanboy - I own all three current gen consoles and I own all three previous gen consoles as well. I find myself preferring certain games on the 360 and others on the PS3 (generally games that require disc swapping.) The Wii also has its own appeal and serves as a much better 'party' platform. Has some great games in its own right too. All three consoles were successes for all three companies. Sony had to work a hell of lot harder to get there, but once developers started figuring out how to work with the convoluted system they were given (with very little in the way of documentation initially, no less) good things started coming out of it. No one failed this generation. Sorry.
Jon Stewart tends to do it in ways that are critical of what Obama is doing rather than simple, unrelated non sequiturs. Republicans just go right for the insults without saying really why. It's not because they're republican, but rather, they're republican and he's a democrat and is simply insulted by most republicans of it rather than because of his policies. If it were 2004, it'd be the same thing in reverse, although maybe a bit more colorful and, in my opinion, more justified... but that's less party politics and more what Bush himself did.
It's politics - especially American politics; one side uses dumb insults for the opposite side regardless on what they're doings imply because hey aren't wearing the same color. The same side tends to be a bit more constructive in their criticism for their own, although there seems to be a LOT more fragmentation among the Republicans than the Democrats these days... not to say there haven't been plenty of Democrats throwing Obama under the bus, but it seems MUCH worse on the other side as far as keeping their shit together.
For the record, if it must be said, I am no fan of Obama. I think it's ineffective as a president. I don't think he's anymore a liar than the next politician. I believe he's been overwhelmed by the reality of the situation in Washington and has been forced to compromised because, as witnessed, his colleagues are willing to act like children just for the sheer fact they don't like the side of the aisle he's on... but that shouldn't come as a surprise to him. So much for willing to kick some asses, Obama=(
It's not really a rag on republicans, though (I don't really side with a party. I side with whoever I think would do the best job at the time.) It's more of an acknowledgment of 'if someone is making a dumb insult, it's probably the guy wearing the different colors.' That's how a good chunk of Americans treat politics - like it's football... and with even less respect for the other side sometimes.
That's what he just said.
Yeah, about that...
Granted, it'll stop John Q. Idiot from getting your data, but if you actually care about data encryption/safety in the first place, John Q. Idiot probably isn't the person you're afraid of. In the real world, there are very few people who need truly secure phones considering that the majority of the data on them is their calendar reminding them to pick up their daughter from school, their contacts list and Angry Birds. A good number of people who claim they want that security generally think what they have on their phone is more important than it really is (or they don't want their wives/girlfriends to find out about the affair they're having.) Only a slim number of people actually need that much security on their phones... and they, wisely, use Blackberries.
It's not exactly hard to just change your passwords in the event your phone gets stolen and they have access to saved banking information (WHY DO YOU HAVE THAT SAVED ON A PHONE?!), Paypal information (more plausible) or Apple Store/Android Market information.
What is the color of the sky in your world where the 360 has been even considered close to a failure? Is there a big Sony or Nintendo logo made out of clouds there?
Slashdot editors are paid...?
To be fair, most people that would make stupid Obama name jokes tend to be Republican.