Blizzard Surprised by Reaction to Online-Only Diablo 3

[erztez]

Within a week, there will be a cracked version that will allow people to play the whole game, for free, without constant connectivity. It is always the case. Don't they see that they are making the legitimate version of the game less appealing than the pirated version with this?

I'm not so sure, I mean it will happen, I don't doubt that but try finding an offline version of Guild Wars. While I'm sure this is about piracy I'm also sure it's built into the very thread of the game and that's a very difficult thing to untangle, not at all on par with hacking together a save system for Assassins Creed 2.

With Assassins Creed: Brotherhood the constant connectivity was built into the thread of the game. Only took a couple of weeks to break it.

Also, while GW wasn't really hacked(well, it was, but not many people actually bothered to pirate it, what with it being dirt cheap), I'll give you an example that WAS.
WoW.
Nuff said?
I've actually set me up a decent private server at home, just for kicks. And yes, a 2007 PC with a 10meg connection CAN actually run a WoW server with 50 people on it Also, WoW LAN? AWESOME!

 

[PatrickXD]

If it has nothing to do with DRM, give the option for offline, it's obvious! Not everyone has internet 24/7!

 

[Gammaj4]

"And, at the end of the day, how many people are going to want to do that?"

Idk, thousands of people?

Probably about the same as the number of people that have just dropped their Diablo III Preorder, and are wondering where they can preorder Torchlight 2.

ALSO.
WHAT.
I often like to wax poetic about the great, even amazing, thing that is, options.
The thing is, if it isn't a fundamental part of the game, something that has to stay as is, the option to change it is good. ANY options you can give me, will allow me to personalize the experience, and make the game fit my sensibilities all the better. For those that don't care, the options are easily ignored, but for those that do, having the option is always MUCH better.
So if it ain't for DRM, drop that required connection like an armed grenade.

 

[Fappy]

Recently the more I hear about this game the less I am inclined to actually buy it. If Torchlight 2 is good enough I'm not going to waste my time and feed the Blizzard beast.

 

[Mike Fang]

Oh gee, people actually want to be able to just turn on a game and play it, not have to create YET ANOTHER online account profile that has to be logged into in order to play (I'm lookin' at you, Bioshock 2). What a surprise.

 

[OMGIllithan]

I'm apologize if some of the things I'm going to say in this post were said already, I haven't had the chance to read every page. I've been a long time lurker on escapist and this whole situation has bothered me enough to break that and share my contribution. In fact, the only contribution I have to this discussion is to say that the glass is half full, and I will be attempting to voice my opinion on this topic with that mentality in mind.

Overall, this is my stance with blizzard/battle.net and this controversey: A company spends years of time making a game thats most certainly going to be a fantastic game. It creates a framework with the intentions of bring people who play all of their games together and help them be more connected. They put more hours into their games than most other companies to make sure they can present a product thats incredibly fun, balanced, and safe for anyone. They listen to community feedback and add balance changes, new features (maybe not every single feature you wanted, but its certainly apparent they listen), and other content to give their games lasting appeal. But somehow despite all of this, the negative side of things, no matter how it pales in comparison to the positives, are brought up and put under a spotlight to be crucified.

From a reasonable standpoint, I want to look at the downsides of this constant internet connection and try to offer plausable explainations for why Blizzard made the decisions they did. The main disadvantage for Diablo 3 requiring a constant internet connection is (obviously) players will no longer be able to create and play characters offline. This is obviously a problem to anyone who doesn't have a stable internet connection. The fortunate side of this argument is that most people nowadays do have a stable internet connection. The unfortunate part, some people don't (particularly those in the army oversees). If I were to leave that point by itself without analyzing it further, its easy to see how someone could get worked up about that. However, there is likely much more to the reasoning behind this other than an ill motive to screw legitimite customers out of playing their game.

First, lets look at Diablo 2 and how it was laid out. When I first played Diablo 2(like I'm sure many others did) I played through the single player portion of the game offline up until I slew the beast Diablo himself. After I did that I though "Hrmm, well maybe I should try the game online now that I have some experience under my belt!" To my dismay, I was not allowed to bring my single player character to my online account. The first point that Blizzard made themselves was that they didn't want that to happen. By saving your characters on a server, this solves that small problem at face value. But wait, thats just stupid, why the hell would that alone be worth forcing customers to mantain a constant internet connection? Well I think theres much more to it than that.

Diablo 2 was FULL of hacks and cheats that allowed a player to dupe items, create fake items, and maphack the unexplored map. It took Blizzard quite a while before they started catching people doing this and banning them for hacks and for duped items. Lets imagine a situation where Blizzard made D3 so that you can play your characters both online and offline. People are much better at creating hacks and cheats than 10 years ago, and without the server to monitor someone, theres nothing prevent them from doing even worse today. And with the new ambitious real money auction hall, it would literally negate the economy. One might argue that the presence of the money auction hall itself might hurt the economy, however as a friend of mine put it, I would much rather have a game's servers be supported by microtransactions than by a subscription fee. The easiest way to solve all of this? Store a player's character on Blizzard's servers. This way Blizzard can make sure that no players can cheat, hack, or scam other players by trading duped items, and the game remains balanced. The side effect is that a player must mantain a connection so that the character data can be saved on the server as the player's character changes. Ok, well you might still disagree with their decision, but it certainly isn't unreasonable.

Now I think it would be unfair to leave it there without mentioning battle.net. I know a lot of people have very strong feelings about battle.net and how its terrible horrible nasty DRM. I will try to leave my own opinions of DRM out of this and lets try to see what Blizzard wanted battle.net to be. Battle.net 2.0 had 3 goals when it was released. First, to make it easy to stay connected with friends throughout all Blizzard games. Second, was to create a matchmaking system for SC2 to simplify the process of players locating and organizing games with their friends. Third was to unify the accounts of all newer Blizzard games to allow a player to customize their profile with achievements, avatars, decals and whatnot. Overall this was a system designed to bring players of Blizzard games more together, which is a good ambition seeing as how Blizzard games have always been heavily driven by their respective communities. At no point in its creation, were there EVER statements released claming that they were glad they could help fight piracy by restricting their customers. I guess the point I'm trying to get at here is that Blizzard as a company created battle.net to benefit the community and not simply to restrict it.

In closing, I do understand that this will affect a small group of people who wont be able to play the game until their living situation changes, which is truly unfortunate and I do not blame you for your frustration. For everyone else though, I plead to try to not take everything at face value, blaming Activision or some other easy scapegoat. If you try to think of the reasoning behind the decisions some companies make, it might appear less evil and greedy than you think. Diablo 3 is going to release and its going to carry the same great quality and polishing of every Blizzard game before it. And you know what, it looks even better when your glass is half full.

Some people don't care about the online community features. The only reason to force those people online is because BNET 2.0 is also DRM.

But my point is that battle.net wasn't created as DRM. They did not make it with the intention of screwing their customers, but to help bring them together. Yes, if you want to look at the core of it, it also serves as a way for Blizzard to protect their software, but in no worse way than the way steam works. You can still install on as many computers as you want and you can still share the game with your friends. The only think you can't do is have two people play the same copy at the same time (is that a completely unreasonable restriction??). As much as people complain about DRM, its not unreasonable for a developer to attempt to protect their software. With battle.net we just get tons of connectivity and other functionality with it.

 

[fundayz]

Next I imagine it'll be region locked and have a cash shop.

The game IS region locked and it DOES have a cash shop (player ran cash shop, but cash shop nonetheless).

 

[Epona]

I'm apologize if some of the things I'm going to say in this post were said already, I haven't had the chance to read every page. I've been a long time lurker on escapist and this whole situation has bothered me enough to break that and share my contribution. In fact, the only contribution I have to this discussion is to say that the glass is half full, and I will be attempting to voice my opinion on this topic with that mentality in mind.

Overall, this is my stance with blizzard/battle.net and this controversey: A company spends years of time making a game thats most certainly going to be a fantastic game. It creates a framework with the intentions of bring people who play all of their games together and help them be more connected. They put more hours into their games than most other companies to make sure they can present a product thats incredibly fun, balanced, and safe for anyone. They listen to community feedback and add balance changes, new features (maybe not every single feature you wanted, but its certainly apparent they listen), and other content to give their games lasting appeal. But somehow despite all of this, the negative side of things, no matter how it pales in comparison to the positives, are brought up and put under a spotlight to be crucified.

From a reasonable standpoint, I want to look at the downsides of this constant internet connection and try to offer plausable explainations for why Blizzard made the decisions they did. The main disadvantage for Diablo 3 requiring a constant internet connection is (obviously) players will no longer be able to create and play characters offline. This is obviously a problem to anyone who doesn't have a stable internet connection. The fortunate side of this argument is that most people nowadays do have a stable internet connection. The unfortunate part, some people don't (particularly those in the army oversees). If I were to leave that point by itself without analyzing it further, its easy to see how someone could get worked up about that. However, there is likely much more to the reasoning behind this other than an ill motive to screw legitimite customers out of playing their game.

First, lets look at Diablo 2 and how it was laid out. When I first played Diablo 2(like I'm sure many others did) I played through the single player portion of the game offline up until I slew the beast Diablo himself. After I did that I though "Hrmm, well maybe I should try the game online now that I have some experience under my belt!" To my dismay, I was not allowed to bring my single player character to my online account. The first point that Blizzard made themselves was that they didn't want that to happen. By saving your characters on a server, this solves that small problem at face value. But wait, thats just stupid, why the hell would that alone be worth forcing customers to mantain a constant internet connection? Well I think theres much more to it than that.

Diablo 2 was FULL of hacks and cheats that allowed a player to dupe items, create fake items, and maphack the unexplored map. It took Blizzard quite a while before they started catching people doing this and banning them for hacks and for duped items. Lets imagine a situation where Blizzard made D3 so that you can play your characters both online and offline. People are much better at creating hacks and cheats than 10 years ago, and without the server to monitor someone, theres nothing prevent them from doing even worse today. And with the new ambitious real money auction hall, it would literally negate the economy. One might argue that the presence of the money auction hall itself might hurt the economy, however as a friend of mine put it, I would much rather have a game's servers be supported by microtransactions than by a subscription fee. The easiest way to solve all of this? Store a player's character on Blizzard's servers. This way Blizzard can make sure that no players can cheat, hack, or scam other players by trading duped items, and the game remains balanced. The side effect is that a player must mantain a connection so that the character data can be saved on the server as the player's character changes. Ok, well you might still disagree with their decision, but it certainly isn't unreasonable.

Now I think it would be unfair to leave it there without mentioning battle.net. I know a lot of people have very strong feelings about battle.net and how its terrible horrible nasty DRM. I will try to leave my own opinions of DRM out of this and lets try to see what Blizzard wanted battle.net to be. Battle.net 2.0 had 3 goals when it was released. First, to make it easy to stay connected with friends throughout all Blizzard games. Second, was to create a matchmaking system for SC2 to simplify the process of players locating and organizing games with their friends. Third was to unify the accounts of all newer Blizzard games to allow a player to customize their profile with achievements, avatars, decals and whatnot. Overall this was a system designed to bring players of Blizzard games more together, which is a good ambition seeing as how Blizzard games have always been heavily driven by their respective communities. At no point in its creation, were there EVER statements released claming that they were glad they could help fight piracy by restricting their customers. I guess the point I'm trying to get at here is that Blizzard as a company created battle.net to benefit the community and not simply to restrict it.

In closing, I do understand that this will affect a small group of people who wont be able to play the game until their living situation changes, which is truly unfortunate and I do not blame you for your frustration. For everyone else though, I plead to try to not take everything at face value, blaming Activision or some other easy scapegoat. If you try to think of the reasoning behind the decisions some companies make, it might appear less evil and greedy than you think. Diablo 3 is going to release and its going to carry the same great quality and polishing of every Blizzard game before it. And you know what, it looks even better when your glass is half full.

Some people don't care about the online community features. The only reason to force those people online is because BNET 2.0 is also DRM.

But my point is that battle.net wasn't created as DRM. They did not make it with the intention of screwing their customers, but to help bring them together. Yes, if you want to look at the core of it, it also serves as a way for Blizzard to protect their software, but in no worse way than the way steam works. You can still install on as many computers as you want and you can still share the game with your friends. The only think you can't do is have two people play the same copy at the same time (is that a completely unreasonable restriction??). As much as people complain about DRM, its not unreasonable for a developer to attempt to protect their software. With battle.net we just get tons of connectivity and other functionality with it.

Always online DRM is an unreasonable restriction. Requiring an internet connection to play a game is going too far. It's as ridiculous as having to have a phone in the NES days because you needed to call Nintendo before playing Super Mario Brothers.

 

[OMGIllithan]

There seems to be some confusion. The hacks and dupes in online Diablo 2 (closed b-net) have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the fact that Diablo 2 allows single player. If Diablo 2 had the same online model as Diablo 3 is planning on having, Diablo 2 still would have had hacks and dupes.

Duping in Diablo 2 single player can be accomplished by copying and pasting your save file in C:/Program Files/Diablo II/Save. Diablo 3 easily could have had the same model as Diablo 2, where single player characters are stored on your computer, and multiplayer characters are stored on bliz's server.

Worrying about Diablo 2 (or Diablo 3) single player items/characters ending up on battle.net is like worrying about characters/items from a private WoW server ending up on on of bliz's WoW servers.

If we can imagine that Blizzard did create an offline mode for D3, there would still need to be some sort of online validation. Whether you like it or not, you can't Blizzard to at LEAST require this much as far as validation goes based on how they're implementing battle.net. And this isn't unreasonable, as most games nowadays require at least some form of a one time validation in order to play. This alone shoots down the "Well what if I'm on a plane" or "What if I have zero access to internet" arguments right there. Wanna play anything on steam? Well you're in the same boat. And you didn't hear anyone complaining about Modern Warfare 2 for that specific reason.

Being that Blizzard games are extremely community driven, and the fact that they have the infrastructure to support it, Blizzard could offer much more consistency by merging the accounts. As far as duping and creating items goes, I hope we can at least agree that having the same account usable both offline and on is a bad idea. I had a program that you could run and enter stats of an item and give it to yourself in game in the single player, and that most certainly would happen again.

 

[direkiller]

I think the problem with allowing people to play offline with the same char as the one you use online is that characters would have to be saved on the computer, and then they could be easily edited to give you all the good items and an infinite amount of gold.

they never have to be the same characters that's how D1 and d2 worked the single player chars are separate from multiplayer ones. Single player hack away. Multiplayer you find your gear from drops just like everyone else

 

[Furrama]

I think Blizz people on the coast forget how bad the internet situation is in the rest of America, and a goodly portion of the world. We just aren't there yet, and to force it to be online during single player is locking people out more than helping people have a better experience. IN SINGLE PLAYER.

 

[Epona]

There seems to be some confusion. The hacks and dupes in online Diablo 2 (closed b-net) have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the fact that Diablo 2 allows single player. If Diablo 2 had the same online model as Diablo 3 is planning on having, Diablo 2 still would have had hacks and dupes.

Duping in Diablo 2 single player can be accomplished by copying and pasting your save file in C:/Program Files/Diablo II/Save. Diablo 3 easily could have had the same model as Diablo 2, where single player characters are stored on your computer, and multiplayer characters are stored on bliz's server.

Worrying about Diablo 2 (or Diablo 3) single player items/characters ending up on battle.net is like worrying about characters/items from a private WoW server ending up on on of bliz's WoW servers.

If we can imagine that Blizzard did create an offline mode for D3, there would still need to be some sort of online validation. Whether you like it or not, you can't Blizzard to at LEAST require this much as far as validation goes based on how they're implementing battle.net. And this isn't unreasonable, as most games nowadays require at least some form of a one time validation in order to play. This alone shoots down the "Well what if I'm on a plane" or "What if I have zero access to internet" arguments right there. Wanna play anything on steam? Well you're in the same boat. And you didn't hear anyone complaining about Modern Warfare 2 for that specific reason.

It's circular logic to say online activation is reasonable since most games use it. Using that logic adding one more game to that list makes the list stronger (which just leads us in circles) but that kind of logic is flawed.

Online activation in and of itself isn't so much a problem but it also follows the rule: "internet connection required to play", which I think is BS.

 

[OMGIllithan]

I think Blizz people on the coast forget how bad the internet situation is in the rest of America, and a goodly portion of the world. We just aren't there yet, and to force it to be online during single player is locking people out more than helping people have a better experience. IN SINGLE PLAYER.

I ran Diablo 2 on a 56k dial up connection, and I can't imagine D3 is going to require much more than that either. If you're posting on this forum right now from your home machine, you will not have an issue playing the game. The only people this is going to affect is people who literally don't have access to the internet (like those oversees). And as I said in a post before, if you don't have internet then you're not going to be able to play anything on steam, and a number of other games that have one time online validation.

 

[fundayz]

If we can imagine that Blizzard did create an offline mode for D3, there would still need to be some sort of online validation. Whether you like it or not, you can't Blizzard to at LEAST require this much as far as validation goes based on how they're implementing battle.net. And this isn't unreasonable, as most games nowadays require at least some form of a one time validation in order to play. This alone shoots down the "Well what if I'm on a plane" or "What if I have zero access to internet" arguments right there. Wanna play anything on steam? Well you're in the same boat. And you didn't hear anyone complaining about Modern Warfare 2 for that specific reason.

There is such a huge gap in your logic that it's mind-boggling how you didn't notice it. Requiring a one time online validation is nothing like requiring internet connecting every time you want to play the game.

The fact that a one time validation requires internet access does NOT "shoot down the "Well what if I'm on a plane" or "What if I have zero access to internet" arguments". At all.

With a one time validation a person could easily validate at home then play offline on the plane, or if you don't have a home internet connection you could easily go to the library/Starbucks/etc and use their internet connection to validate the game.

Your points are deeply and fundamentally flawed.

I had a program that you could run and enter stats of an item and give it to yourself in game in the single player, and that most certainly would happen again.

So? What does it matter if a person wants to cheat in a strictly single player mode? Some games provide the cheats for you because they are fun.

I also had the program(you could also create a character) and I had incredible fun with it on offline mode. Diablo 3 won't have this fun.

 

[Nesco Nomen]

Ok. I want to reasonable here so I'm gonna ask the same two questions I always pose when this issue comes up.

I am on dial-up so;

A: Can I play your game? (Or do you require a high speed connection)

A: Definitely. You're likely going to have a ping in the 200's of miliseconds, though. Not nearly as good as playing offline, with 0ms, however still playable.

Hit registration, all the content streaming and code execution is executed locally. There's no middleman from Bnet, except sending/receiving bits and pieces here and there, so it will feel like playing completely offline - 0ms ping

 

[OMGIllithan]

There seems to be some confusion. The hacks and dupes in online Diablo 2 (closed b-net) have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the fact that Diablo 2 allows single player. If Diablo 2 had the same online model as Diablo 3 is planning on having, Diablo 2 still would have had hacks and dupes.

Duping in Diablo 2 single player can be accomplished by copying and pasting your save file in C:/Program Files/Diablo II/Save. Diablo 3 easily could have had the same model as Diablo 2, where single player characters are stored on your computer, and multiplayer characters are stored on bliz's server.

Worrying about Diablo 2 (or Diablo 3) single player items/characters ending up on battle.net is like worrying about characters/items from a private WoW server ending up on on of bliz's WoW servers.

If we can imagine that Blizzard did create an offline mode for D3, there would still need to be some sort of online validation. Whether you like it or not, you can't Blizzard to at LEAST require this much as far as validation goes based on how they're implementing battle.net. And this isn't unreasonable, as most games nowadays require at least some form of a one time validation in order to play. This alone shoots down the "Well what if I'm on a plane" or "What if I have zero access to internet" arguments right there. Wanna play anything on steam? Well you're in the same boat. And you didn't hear anyone complaining about Modern Warfare 2 for that specific reason.

It's circular logic to say online activation is reasonable since most games use it. Using that logic adding one more game to that list makes the list stronger (which just leads us in circles) but that kind of logic is flawed.

Online activation in and of itself isn't so much a problem but it also follows the rule: "internet connection required to play", which I think is BS.

I should be more specific in my logic then because you're right, just saying the other guy did it so its ok isn't quite sound. I can start off by saying that it shouldn't be deemed unreasonable that a company would want to attempt to protect their software. There are many different strategies that companies use to accomplish this goal. The most effective strategies for a company are to require some sort of online validation. This is the middle ground between not being intrusive and also putting up a layer of protection for the company. Thats why I think its reasonable, you may disagree.