'Always online' will affect you whether or not you have a good connection.

[Aeshi]

Simply ignoring the idea that maybe some people want to play alone without need of an internet connection.

Then why did they buy a game that (as said before) quite clearly says it always needs an Internet connection. If you don't have a (reliable) Internet connection, don't buy games that require them. Simple as

MMOs require an internet connection? fine.
Are these games MMOs? No, if they are then don't say they have a single-player option.

I don't care about how clear their statements on the box are (I do my research anyway), I'm not going to consider touching a single-player game that needs alway-online to work. But don't treat me like an idiot who can't see a bullshit argument. "It's an MMO." is both untrue and reeks of horrible logic.

And how is it untrue exactly?

Let's take Spiral Knights as an example. It's clearly listed as an MMO, Its status AS an MMO has never been questioned, but it could not be called "Massively (Multiplayer)" by any means, as the most players you can have in a (PVE) level at any one time is 4 (not counting the towns, because the only real interaction you can do there is chatting & emoting at other players)

Why is it that Spiral Knight's 4-player Co-op is enough to qualify it for MMO status but, say, D3's 4-player Co-op isn't? What makes the 2 different other than their 3-letter labels?

Heck, Minions of Mirth is called an MMO and that has offline single-player, which by your Standards should disqualify it from the MMO club.

 

[FoolKiller]

Personally I just wish that service would be treated the same way as a product meaning that if your service is down, then I should get reimbursed for time payed that I didn't get to use the service.

The problem with consoles is that there is a shelf life and with the online dependence, they are creating a shelf life of the content you have paid for. I am not okay with that. I still play NES games every once in a while. With the current trend, this wouldn't be a possibility when the following generation hits.

 

[Auron]

Isn't Blizzard still providing support for Diablo II servers? I know it had a new small patch just within the last year or two.

Diablo I's Battle.net is still up, that's 17 years of service, it'll probably be up for ever in fact. I've seem very few servers being discontinued in PC gaming actually, even gamespy's death didn't kill most of the games that used it.

Always online games are a mess for one or two weeks because of login servers being overloaded and general lag and then it works out, the doom of servers dying is mostly alarmist discourse with no foundation and other than that there's no real problem other than the stability issue which cannot be fixed unless they take a risk and buy more than enough servers. EA might be a bit more problematic but pretty much every 10 year+ multiplayer game I have from them is still supported. The xbox I'll pass, the lack of backwards compatibility and the steering to make you rebuy old games should be self-explanatory.

 

[SquidSponge]

In an effort to not vent all of my rages in the general direction of this forum I shall attempt to keep this concise. My opinion regarding "always-online" (and, for that matter, any other form of DRM) discussions can often be summarised as follows:

DRM, in any form, has in its essence the singular purpose of restricting the usage of a product (and don't you bloody DARE use the word "service"). In its very basic form, therefore, DRM can take from the consumer, but can never give. So the very BEST the consumer can ever expect from DRM is to break even, and history (such as a term can be used for gaming) would suggest even this is a highly unlikely scenario.

Also, Dexter111 - for services rendered during post #59, I bequeath unto thee one (1) metric internet. I think I'm making more or less the same point as you, albeit laconically.

 

[Aeshi]

Wow, you basically just explained the very reason yourself e.g. having a persistent large world to return back to where you can meet, trade, talk to other people and do many other tasks.

Diablo III on the other hand doesn't have any persistence between games, the only thing being saved is your character.
It isn't different from Diablo II in how it's built either, it even regressed for instance from the 8 players allowed to 4 total and you can play it through entirely Solo.
There isn't a single feature that would suggest this game should and could only be played Online.

If Diablo III was designed like this it would've been an MMO, but it isn't (go to about 12 Minutes in for emphasis on differences):
[youtube vid]
It is a SinglePlayer game with a Multiplayer Mode and a forced Always-Online DRM.

Same reason why "Battlefield 3" for instance is a "Multiplayer shooter" (because it has entirely separate matches where everything starts anew and a Lobby/round system to join those) and PlanetSide 2 is an MMO because it takes place in a large persistent world.

Except the "world" (read: town) in Spiral Knights isn't large or persistent, it's one town, and that town is instanced. If there are too many players for one "Instance" of the town the servers just generate a new one and shunts the extras there, and if BF3's 644-player matches and Soldier persistence don't qualify it for MMO status, I doubt Spiral Knight's 125-player[footnote]if that, it's probably less.[/footnote] instances of the town whose closest thing to persistence is the positions of the randomly wandering birds does either.

In fact the only things about Spiral Knights that truly encompass the entire playerbase are the Lobby, the AH and the Microtransaction store and the Energy Depot (and that first one only really connects everyone currently in the town.)

 

[SquidSponge]

[snip]
BTW I own HAWX2. It doesn't work because it can't connect to the servers. It just can't. Ever. Even if it was only a one-time check (which it isn't of course), it still stops me from playing the game I own. Ironically the first HAWX came with no copy protection whatsoever. Fuck every kind of DRM.

My favourite is the time I got a copy of Dreamfall in some kind of bundle with the Longest Journey - it was a rerelease of some kind, so Dreamfall was already kinda old when I got it. It took me a year to get 'round to tLJ, another year on/off to complete that, so when I came to install Dreamfall itself I was on Windows Vista. What I didn't know at the time, mostly on account of it telling me absolutely fucking nowhere ever, was that installing the game I'd paid for also installed DRM (was it StarForce or SecuRom? I don't remember now) without permission. Which promptly failed to recognise the OS (presumably because it was 64-bit) and came nanometres from permanently bricking my £1000 PC. This is why I call myself a sworn enemy of DRM. Of course, it took me a few days and a minor miracle (which to this day I don't remember how I did) to get my PC un-bricked (during which time my Uni work suffered) then a couple of hours of Google-Fu to diagnose the problem.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

As for always online being bad, its not in and of it self (although i do hate it if your playing single player offline). You mentioned Diablo 3 and Simcity. The online part wasnt the issue with those titles. It was lack of server space and the developers releasing a crappy game without proper testing and ensuring it was ready. If they released both games with zero problems so people could play them perfectly day one, there wouldnt be moaning.

It wasn't just lack of server space. Internet connection fluctuates. Every online game experiences lag, because every download of information from the internet is constantly fluctuating at anything from maximum bandwidth to none at all.

Just type Diablo 3 rubberbanding into Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=diablo+3+rubberbanding&oq=diabl&gs_l=youtube.1.0.35i39j0l9.3985.5426.0.6573.7.6.1.0.0.0.114.533.5j1.6.0...0.0...1ac.1.11.youtube.DZyY-dCQfPI

Lag in singleplayer. Periods when you cannot play the game when you want to. Accounts being hacked. Artificial lifespans placed on games that will expire at the will of the company. All issues with Always Online.

That should not be happening in a single player game. Period. There is no "aww it's a shame" there's no "but it has to..." There are no excuses. If a game is single player, it should be purely run on your computer, by your computer. If you don't need a server under a mountain in Arizona constantly sending you information to keep your game running then you shouldn't require a server under a mountain in Arizona to constantly send you information to keep your game running.

Yes, "If they released both games with zero problems so people could play them perfectly day one, there wouldn't be moaning." But they cannot do that with current internet infrastructure, and possibly never will be able to. Having to connect to a server to play a single player game has problems. It creates issues and times when your game will be unplayable because of circumstances outside of your control. It also brings no benefits. Not one. There is no reason for a single player game to be constantly connected to a server that could not also be achieved by having optional server usage. None.

This is a very absolute issue. Always online single player will bring problems for the customer, and no benefits. Therefore it should not be in the game.

 

[Lovely Mixture]

If your car is broken, your only option is to not use it until a mechanic fixes it. You get to choose when he starts but not how long he takes, or how much he charges. Unless you're fixing your own computer its the same deal, you have no choice, you get no warning its just dead until it gets fixed. Fate decides when your "insert object/service" here and people on the other side decide when it's ready for use again. When MS shuts Xbox live down for maintenance there's not a gamer who can do a thing about it, but its not so different from a lot of other things people have no control over.

But you DO have control. The problem is YOUR responsibility. If you're good with cars, you can try repairing it yourself.
I don?t see how this is hard to understand.

Ease is a very relative term, I know I don't have the skill to shut down or hijack Xbox live... but a carjacking, I'm capable of that. Regardless of the vulnerabilities I will be able to use my Xbox again once the hijacking is over, but if I get my original car back, it will also have the same vulnerabilities as well... and that's assuming I got the car back, which is not the most likely outcome of that hijacking.

I don?t see how you're countering my argument here. The point is that the car's components are not in your possession, it doesn't matter if you are "guaranteed" their return.

Then why did they buy a game that (as said before) quite clearly says it always needs an Internet connection. If you don't have a (reliable) Internet connection, don't buy games that require them. Simple as

Hold up a minute... something works in exactly the way they said it, they didn't hide anything and spring it on you after it was too late for you not to buy it... and you, being fully aware of the situation, still paid money for the product? Then you got exactly what you paid for... if the product works as advertised then you're not actually entitled to anything more. If you want more I can understand that, but you got what you paid for if that's not enough then don't buy it and find someone else who delivers what you want. If the Microsoft "friend zones" you then ranting about how unfair it is that you didn't get what you wanted and deserved as a gamer is kinda uncalled for.

You keep implying that I/they (the hypothetical person) have bought the product. I?m not. In fact, the reason I?m criticizing it is because I would LIKE to buy the product, but see this dumb bullshit.

That argument is based on the idea of the product being falsely advertised, which I never claimed. I'm not defending the people who bought Diablo III/Simcity and can't/couldn't play it. I'm criticizing the practice.

MMOs require an internet connection? fine.
Are these games MMOs? No, if they are then don't say they have a single-player option.

I don't care about how clear their statements on the box are (I do my research anyway), I'm not going to consider touching a single-player game that needs alway-online to work. But don't treat me like an idiot who can't see a bullshit argument. "It's an MMO." is both untrue and reeks of horrible logic.

And how is it untrue exactly?

Dexter explained the technical aspects better than I could. But I'll still try it in my own words:

Diablo III and Simcity were never billed as MMOs. They had been newly announced instances of singleplayer game series. In Diablo's case, they had multiplayer that was optional. Had they been billed as MMOs, people would have criticized the change in direction, not the dumb justification that EA or Blizzard used.

MMO also implies that the multiplayer is a core and intended part of the game experience, one in which you cannot avoid the possibility of multiplayer, one that requires you to be part of an online economy.

Heck, Minions of Mirth is called an MMO and that has offline single-player, which by your Standards should disqualify it from the MMO club.

Fine let me restate:

MMOs require an internet connection? fine.
Are these games MMOs? No, if they are, then don't say they have a single-player option that requires me to be part of an online community 24/7 that I have no wish to be a part of.

 

[RicoADF]

I do indeed know what the cloud is. And saying "it's underpowered" means that you're implying I'm talking about something different. If SimCity did indeed use Infrastructure as a Service and it failed as hard as it did, then what they actually did is throw "cloud" more as a buzzword. The could is there to overprovide tremendously. It's processing as a utility, so there is no actual need to not do it. And since EA can clearly throw money at this game, they could have prepared for launch peak loads. They didn't. And they had to deploy more machines. That's not "using the cloud" that's "using buzzwords because it makes us look kewl" and then just...botching it.

But then again it's not like Microsoft are not guilty of using buzzwords themselves

*Video Snip*

Can you tell what the fuck the cloud is from this? Imagine this was your introduction. I mean, I can guess that it's probably SaaS but it also comes across as...fucking magic. If the ad ended and it revealed it was about yoghurt, I'd have served the same purpose, to be honest.

Yes well I seriously doubt Microsoft and EA even know what the cloud is or how it's suppose to work, no surprise there really. I find the whole XBone fiasco to be utterly rediculas, how they can screw up something simple so easily....