Blizzard Surprised by Reaction to Online-Only Diablo 3

[Group Grope]

Blizzard expected the reaction they're getting.
Blizzard claims that they didn't expect it because anything else would have infuriated us more.
But at the end of the day this just means that anyone who needs a copy that has had the DRM (and anyone who thinks that there is any other reason for always online other then DRM dose more coke then is healthy) neutered out of it will have to torrent the game+crack after they buy an official copy and wait two days for crack to become available. Of coarse there might be some evil and unscrupulous individuals that skip the "buy an official copy" step but of coarse no one on these forums would ever dream of that...

right, so lets all clap for blizzard and their generous donation to local ISP's who will benefit from all that unnecessary extra bandwidth we will all soon need cause that's all they have done here, force paying customers to learn how to avoid paying
/clap

next topic for blizzard SCII being broken up into three games really, really...?

 

[Atmos Duality]

Finally, has anyone here played the finished version? No? Didn't think so. So before you go off your rails about "If I lose my connection, I'll be wtf pnwed and all my items will break and I'll cry" how about we wait and see how it's actually handled. It's quite possible that Blizzard will have a system in place that can detect when you're offline, and will phase you out until you return, or just port you to town. I don't know, and neither do you.

Actually, we already do have a pretty good idea of how it's going to work.
We have confirmation from Blizzard that there will be ABSOLUTELY NO offline mode, and Starcraft 2 already modeled Bnet 2.0's online DRM for multiplayer games; flaws and all.

Putting up with a single point of failure is more infuriating than fun and it ruins the experience. I hate the MMO model because of that point of failure, but at least I realized why it was necessary.

Here, it isn't necessary; Blizzard is just forcing it upon us because they want more money.
When they fail to deliver their part of the service, even just a little, we are bearing the entire burden for THEIR benefit.

At this point, most of the bitching and complaining sounds like people are just upset that they won't be able to cheat. "How am I supposed to get the complete runeword if I can't just spawn all the pieces at once?"

I hope by "most" you meant "almost nobody", because that's the actual amount of people bitching about losing the ability to cheat/hack/dupe in this topic.

 

[Nesco Nomen]

Hey no need to go into psychology of corporation(s).

I want to say just this:
From what I've seen/heard, I am almost certain that D3 will be an AWESOME playing experience for me.

It is also my belief that majority of ppl who are posting things like

Here I come Blowtorch 2!

will end up buying D3, because in reality they are just as enthusiastic about D3 prospects as I am.

And what action RPG loving gamer wouldn't be?

High quality(its Blizz ffs) PC GAME with: Single + Multi + PVP + ARENA + LADDERS + Real paper doll and grid based inventory system + tons of sweet gear spread among randomly generated levels/quests

Why cry/threaten then? Because that's what ppl do in consumer oriented market when they don't get EVERYTHING they hoped for, right?

 

[Group Grope]

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'd actually be willing to take you up on that. If Diablo 3 will work the way I think it will work, you either won't see a cracked version at all, or see a vastly inferior version full of bugs and such.

Remember, there is no single-player for the pirates to crack. This is going to be the same as trying to crack SC2's multi-player.

Assassins Creed: Brotherhood had the same sort of constant connectivity and it was cracked within a month. The only difference now is that the hackers have experience with cracking games like this because of their work with AC:B.

lol ppl can crack anything, it's just a matter of time, and ppl have been doing it since way before PC games AC:B is by no mean the only place crackers will have gotten XP for this work I have a "Friend" that cracked lotus 1-2-3 (bonus points if you know what that is) it's a matter of break points in the binary and time.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

This translates into an EULA whose terms actually *are* absolute and fully enforceable by law in the United States.

But there are many other countries where the EULA has no legal wight.

More on topic, Blizzard lost a costumer here.
Last game with this shit I played was Assassins Creed and I say no thanks. In the end I had to download a crack so that I wouldn't have problems playing my copy of the game. The one which I PAYED for.

 

[Nesco Nomen]

double post xD

 

[commasplice]

the only sea of shit is what comes out of the mouths of people like you that ***** and complain about how this industry is going to hell but are still buying games or have you decide to be one of the ones that actually left. well your on here so maybe not.

Please, just stop. I've seen you posting all over this thread and, for the most part, I've been ignoring it because most of what you have to say is just mindless flaming. My hope was that if no one fed the troll, it would eventually go away. This is not the case, however.

I understand that you have an opinion and that you have points to make. That's not what I take issue with. You come off as arrogant, ignorant and intolerant, and it grates on my nerves. Say your piece if you must, but do so without:

a) lumping everyone you disagree with together

b) connecting vaguely related points that really don't make a whole lot of sense together (i.e. implying that there's something wrong with the people who dislike where the industry is going, but still buy games. Their complaints stem from the fact that they WANT to be part of the gaming community, home slice. This kind of argument just makes it sound like you're trying to say people who don't think what you think should go away)

and, c) writing in broken, barely comprehensible English. I mean, if it's not your native language, I understand, but really, it just makes you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about, irrespective of how valid your point actually is.

I guess what I'm saying is that you really need to stop and think a bit harder on your posts before hitting Enter.

 

[bakan]

Hey no need to go into psychology of corporation(s).

I want to say just this:
From what I've seen/heard, I am almost certain that D3 will be an AWESOME playing experience for me.

It is also my belief that majority of ppl who are posting things like

Here I come Blowtorch 2!

will end up buying D3, because in reality they are just as enthusiastic about D3 prospects as I am.

And what action RPG loving gamer wouldn't be?

High quality(its Blizz ffs) PC GAME with: Single + Multi + PVP + ARENA + LADDERS + Real paper doll and grid based inventory system + tons of sweet gear spread among randomly generated levels/quests

Why cry/threaten then? Because that's what ppl do in consumer oriented market when they don't get EVERYTHING they hoped for, right?

Bad side, no offline play, no lan mode, no mods, health orbs, art style still not really dark and dingy, automated stats, no skill trees, ah any many more.
Yeah, for me the bad side is somewhat heavier and stop saying most complainers will still buy it, at least 7 of 9 people I know who wanted to buy it just refuse to do so after the recent news and they are the same people who didn't buy SC2.

Well in the end enough corporate sheep will buy it and it will sell enough to be a hit, which is kinda sad.

edit: oh yeah, I just repeated myself ~~

 

[Tony2077]

the only sea of shit is what comes out of the mouths of people like you that ***** and complain about how this industry is going to hell but are still buying games or have you decide to be one of the ones that actually left. well your on here so maybe not.

Please, just stop. I've seen you posting all over this thread and, for the most part, I've been ignoring it because most of what you have to say is just mindless flaming. My hope was that if no one fed the troll, it would eventually go away. This is not the case, however.

I understand that you have an opinion and that you have points to make. That's not what I take issue with. You come off as arrogant, ignorant and intolerant, and it grates on my nerves. Say your piece if you must, but do so without:

a) lumping everyone you disagree with together

b) connecting vaguely related points that really don't make a whole lot of sense together (i.e. implying that there's something wrong with the people who dislike where the industry, but still buy games. Their complaints stem from the fact that they WANT to be part of the gaming community, home slice. This kind of argument just makes it sound like you're trying to say people who don't think what you think should go away)

and, c) writing in broken, barely comprehensible English. I mean, if it's not your native language, I understand, but really, it just makes you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about, irrespective of how valid your point actually is.

I guess what I'm saying is that you really need to stop and think a bit harder on your posts before hitting Enter.

it my native laungage i just don't care enough to fix it. to be honest when people say I'm stupid without just saying it pisses me off more then them calling me stupid. why not lump them together its not like there not saying the same thing in the end. i don't like this so I'll complain about on a forum that won't really change anything. even on there site it won't change anything. don't like it don't buy it and move on. is this better or should i edit it more

 

[Nesco Nomen]

Bad side, no offline play, no lan mode, no mods, health orbs, art style still not really dark and dingy, automated stats, no skill trees, ah any many more.
Yeah, for me the bad side is somewhat heavier and stop saying most complainers will still buy it, at least 7 of 9 people I know who wanted to buy it just refuse to do so after the recent news and they are the same people who didn't buy SC2.

Well in the end enough corporate sheep will buy it and it will sell enough to be a hit, which is kinda sad.

Allow me to paraphrase

All those things will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

A year from now no one will even remember Diablo had skills you had to chose from.
Same like LAN.
Or 'art style', that template for every disappointed old fan bad things list.
I actually believe that folks at Blizzard have an uncanny knack for design AND COLORS (very rare thing nowadays)

 

[Atmos Duality]

This translates into an EULA whose terms actually *are* absolute and fully enforceable by law in the United States.

But there are many other countries where the EULA has no legal wight.

More on topic, Blizzard lost a costumer here.
Last game with this shit I played was Assassins Creed and I say no thanks. In the end I had to download a crack so that I wouldn't have problems playing my copy of the game. The one which I PAYED for.

Oh, I know. The EU in particular has a different set of laws and guidelines.
Of course, if Blizzard does ban people under the same stipulations in their EULA elsewhere, they're probably hoping that legal fees alone will dissuade individual people from taking it to court.
That's usually the strategy with big business and the threats of individuals.

 

[nerdpride]

Hey no need to go into psychology of corporation(s).

I want to say just this:
From what I've seen/heard, I am almost certain that D3 will be an AWESOME playing experience for me.

It is also my belief that majority of ppl who are posting things like

Here I come Blowtorch 2!

will end up buying D3, because in reality they are just as enthusiastic about D3 prospects as I am.

And what action RPG loving gamer wouldn't be?

High quality(its Blizz ffs) PC GAME with: Single + Multi + PVP + ARENA + LADDERS + Real paper doll and grid based inventory system + tons of sweet gear spread among randomly generated levels/quests

Why cry/threaten then? Because that's what ppl do in consumer oriented market when they don't get EVERYTHING they hoped for, right?

Bad side, no offline play, no lan mode, no mods, health orbs, art style still not really dark and dingy, automated stats, no skill trees, ah any many more.
Yeah, for me the bad side is somewhat heavier and stop saying most complainers will still buy it, at least 7 of 9 people I know who wanted to buy it just refuse to do so after the recent news and they are the same people who didn't buy SC2.

Well in the end enough corporate sheep will buy it and it will sell enough to be a hit, which is kinda sad.

edit: oh yeah, I just repeated myself ~~

The last videogame I bought came out in 2007. I got it off Amazon for five bucks, which felt like an OK deal. I won't be able to do this with Blizzard games from now on, they will be sold at much closer to full price even years after release. The last game I bought at full price was from 2003, and it felt like a rip-off back then. A half-off sale would be surprising, but probably still not good enough, it is a lot similar to D2 after all.

Some of us are really serious about not buying games when the industry doesn't satisfy us.

But also, what do we get out of it? These days people think I'm not a gamer, I don't count as a lost sale to them, they don't need to consider what I want.

Screw Blizzard. It's not about them, it's about my time and money.

 

[commasplice]

it my native laungage i just don't care enough to fix it. to be honest when people say I'm stupid without just saying it pisses me off more then them calling me stupid.

I didn't say you were stupid. I said that you sound arrogant, ignorant and intolerant. I think I'd like to amend that, though: you are arrogant, ignorant and intolerant.

why not lump them together its not like there not saying the same thing in the end.

That's the thing, though: they are saying different things. For example, I don't like Blizzard's decisions, but I didn't say that I was a definite no-buy. I said that this news changed me from being someone who was absolutely getting this game to someone who might buy it. And, for me, this is a big distinction to make, because I don't have a lot of money to throw around. So chances are that, since I'm not dead-set on it anymore, I'm probably going to spend my money on something that actually makes me go "squee" the way this game used to.

i don't like this so I'll complain about on a forum that won't really change anything. even on there site it won't change anything. don't like it don't buy it and move on.

Okay. Well, I would say to you that if you don't like what someone has to say, you can ignore it and move on. Your logic, not mine. Don't be a hypocrite.

 

[bakan]

Bad side, no offline play, no lan mode, no mods, health orbs, art style still not really dark and dingy, automated stats, no skill trees, ah any many more.
Yeah, for me the bad side is somewhat heavier and stop saying most complainers will still buy it, at least 7 of 9 people I know who wanted to buy it just refuse to do so after the recent news and they are the same people who didn't buy SC2.

Well in the end enough corporate sheep will buy it and it will sell enough to be a hit, which is kinda sad.

Allow me to paraphrase

All those things will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

A year from now no one will even remember Diablo had skills you had to chose from.
Same like LAN.
Or 'art style', that template for every disappointed old fan bad things list.

I actually believe that folks at Blizzard have an uncanny knack for design AND COLORS (very rare thing nowadays)

Condor aka Blizzard North had a nice touch for design for specific games to get the atmosphere.
Blizzard Irvine goes for the happy colorful WoW art style (well, they already made it darker after the first complains and it became better)

Oh, and let me guess, not in 1 year from now on, but in roughly 10 years when we have the next generation of paying gamers we are only left with the same uniform pulp of games because the current generation lost the will to critize and became model customers who buy everything the companies throw at them.

 

[Snotnarok]

I dunno how this reaction wasn't seen coming considering there's some (like me) who have no interest in playing these games with anyone ever. I have friends who are getting this game, I don't want to play with them. I want to play at my pace and not have to worry about the servers going down or my connection dropping to bloody play a single player game I bought.

There is no defense for this, they simply want you connected for DRM/anti-piracy and to get you to see their auction house.

 

[lowkey_jotunn]

Finally, has anyone here played the finished version? No? Didn't think so. So before you go off your rails about "If I lose my connection, I'll be wtf pnwed and all my items will break and I'll cry" how about we wait and see how it's actually handled. It's quite possible that Blizzard will have a system in place that can detect when you're offline, and will phase you out until you return, or just port you to town. I don't know, and neither do you.

Actually, we already do have a pretty good idea of how it's going to work.
We have confirmation from Blizzard that there will be ABSOLUTELY NO offline mode, and Starcraft 2 already modeled Bnet 2.0's online DRM for multiplayer games; flaws and all.

Putting up with a single point of failure is more infuriating than fun and it ruins the experience. I hate the MMO model because of that point of failure, but at least I realized why it was necessary.

Here, it isn't necessary; Blizzard is just forcing it upon us because they want more money.
When they fail to deliver their part of the service, even just a little, we are bearing the entire burden for THEIR benefit.

Single point of failure? You mean like your computer? Or the OS running on your computer? Or the power keeping those computers on. Trust me on this, Blizzard has a far better redundancy than whatever you've got plugged in at your house. And whatever crappy internet you put up with probably has significantly better uptime than your PC.

Unless, of course, you're running RAID arrays in your little HP laptop. And run a GHOST server (or some other OS deployment solution) in case of a Windows Crash. And have multiple computers on different phase AC, with an UPS ...

Do you even understand the concept of single point of failure? Trust me, for 99% of people, you are the weakest link.

Plus, you didn't even address my question of fault tolerance on Blizzard's end. How will the D3 servers handle the situation when someone inevitably disconnects? Will there be a solution in place to make sure you don't get insta-gibbed? I tossed out the possibilities of phasing out until you got back, or a free hearth... but really, we don't know.

(really though, you shouldn't talk Fault Tolerance with a Hardware Engineer for a large Aerospace company)

At this point, most of the bitching and complaining sounds like people are just upset that they won't be able to cheat. "How am I supposed to get the complete runeword if I can't just spawn all the pieces at once?"

I hope by "most" you meant "almost nobody", because that's the actual amount of people bitching about losing the ability to cheat/hack/dupe in this topic.

Right, because scammers are gonna come right out and say "I'm pissed that you cut off my ability to scam." Are you really that naive?

They're going to complain that "DRM is icky" and that "A requirement for a persistent connection is too restrictive." When in reality, this is the 21 freaking century. Over 75% of the US has internet connectivity. If you're on this forum right now, you are probably one of them... so get with the times, hookup the cable internet, and enjoy you some D3.

 

[commasplice]

They're going to complain that "DRM is icky" and that "A requirement for a persistent connection is too restrictive." When in reality, this is the 21 freaking century. Over 75% of the US has internet connectivity. If you're on this forum right now, you are probably one of them... so get with the times, hookup the cable internet, and enjoy you some D3.

Look, I'll admit that I've used mods in an MMO before, but never anything that gave me a real tangible advantage over other players. Just aesthetic stuff, really.

Edit: Derp. Forgot my real point. I'm not a scammer, but I oppose this decision. Just because someone doesn't like something that would make it harder to pirate or scam does not mean they are a pirate or a scammer.

 

[LorienvArden]

"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?"

Translates to me as :

"We honestly don't care about our customers who can not be online 100% of their gametime. We need to have each and every one of our players connected to our leash while they use our service. The players need to be online and verifyable to use the service that will make us money, like the auction houses anyway, so those that do not want to use them aren't worth the time and effort anyway."

There is a big difference between beeing able to authenticate the state of a character and Always-on. The former is a sensible solution to prevent the RMT system to go completly out of control with cheating, the second one is starforce-equivallent DRM.
If we want D3 to be an MMO, we would like it to be marketed as an MMO, with new content beeing phased in for our continued contribution. Those of us who played D1 and D2 with friends over a LAN, or by ourselfs, who modded and maintained a budding comunity for those games for over a decade, are now just "not good enough" for Blizzards management ?

If you couldn't see this comming when you decided it was a good idea, you should SERIOUSLY rethink how you do business. Because every potential lead customer out there and every tester you could have pulled from the comunity of your fanbase could have told you that there are thousands that would not like this decision. You REALLY need to sweeten the deal on this matter.

HOW does "always on" benefit us ?
WHY should we care ?
Whats in D3 that we couldn't get from Torchlight 2 or other products ?

 

[Tony2077]

it my native laungage i just don't care enough to fix it. to be honest when people say I'm stupid without just saying it pisses me off more then them calling me stupid.

I didn't say you were stupid. I said that you sound arrogant, ignorant and intolerant. I think I'd like to amend that, though: you are arrogant, ignorant and intolerant.

why not lump them together its not like there not saying the same thing in the end.

That's the thing, though: they are saying different things. For example, I don't like Blizzard's decisions, but I didn't say that I was a definite no-buy. I said that this news changed me from being someone who was absolutely getting this game to someone who might buy it. And, for me, this is a big distinction to make, because I don't have a lot of money to throw around. So chances are that, since I'm not dead-set on it anymore, I'm probably going to spend my money on something that actually makes me go "squee" the way this game used to.

i don't like this so I'll complain about on a forum that won't really change anything. even on there site it won't change anything. don't like it don't buy it and move on.

Okay. Well, I would say to you that if you don't like what someone has to say, you can ignore it and move on. Your logic, not mine. Don't be a hypocrite.

well guess i'm done here since everyone thinks i'm an idiot after all so why bother saying anything more other then this. but still complaining or what ever on a place like this even going for 18 pages. I'm not sure what you guys are doing but its not going to do anything in the end seems more like venting since no one here can do anything other then agree or disagree or be a troll like me since to be honest we're fucked even we care about stuff like this so either stop caring or leave. this is the world we live in and we're stuck with it. play the games and have fun or find something else to do with your time.