http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117988825?refCatId=2526Hammeroj said:
BOOM citation! Quick and dirty read gives all the major plot points. Namely:
Diablo 3 no offline reasoning summarized by Penny Arcade
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BOOM citation! Quick and dirty read gives all the major plot points. Namely:
You could be right, but I still think this was an inevitable move.targren said:
There's also the fact that we don't know if Blizzard is considering adding an offline mode for one of their expansions, once they work out a better plan of attack for these issues. Something tells me they're going to see how the original game goes before they make that decision.
And that's the problem people have right there: Diablo 3 is trying to be a go-between MMORPG.Jaime_Wolf said:
There's nothing to be done about it; if Blizzard wants to change the direction of their franchise to WoW-lite, then they will.
Their terms and arrangements have become unacceptable for my purposes (I just rebooted my router 20 minutes ago because the ISP went DERP on the other end for about an hour), and no amount of weak assumptions and rationalization will change that.
It's just disappointing to watch Blizzard deliberately downgrade their games for the sake of pure greed and control.
Rather than argue it further, I'm going to look at alternative games.
"I realise that this is just them changing the direction of the game, not necessarily making it worse.Atmos Duality said:
...
But it's not changing the direction a way I like so:
BLIZZARD, WHY ARE YOU DELIBERATELY MAKING YOUR GAME WORSE?"
You have to see how childish this sounds.
Failing to cater to your personal needs is not indicative of failure to make a good game.
Blizzard will make a good game. It's just that the criteria of what a good game is have changed. Not long ago games were a labour of love. Today they're not. They're meant to bring in money. As much money as possible. And Diablo III was designed to bring in money. So if good game = lots of cash then by all means yes, it will be a good game.Jaime_Wolf said:
Tell me, do you believe that a gamedev company can take steps that worsen the enjoyment of game by the customer but generate increased revenue? Do you think any companies do so? If so, give a few examples.
You are misquoting him. Taking a section (not feature) out of your game which drew in a large audience by itself is downgrading your game. Online fans don't think so because they are being catered to. The poster established that there is nothing we nay-Sayers can do to change what this game will be. All we can do is not purchase it because for us the game is a HUGE downgrade. The only part still intact is the part I didn't use and the feature of the auction house doesn't interest me due to my preference in playstyle. All I am seeing is intent to make a popular franchise be built from the ground up for microtransactions. You can bet we are seeing that foundation. One or two years ago farmville made more money than WoW did because of microtransactions.Jaime_Wolf said:
Wait what? How are any of the games they've released any lower then there quality standard from years ago? Stacraft 2, excellent game with amazing polish. Same with Wow, tell mwe how is Diablo worse? or for that matter starcraft 2? we just have to play online OH NO. I bet everytime your own your desktop your online. Whats the problem?Vakz said:
It's called integrity. At one time Blizzard had this, but success goes to their heads like it always it does. Back then Blizzard was interested in making good games, now Blizzard is more interested in pleasing their shareholders and it's starting to show in some of their products (World of Warcraft).SteelStallion said:
Ah, all the people wailing at the GALL of businesses trying to increase revenue stream.
It's so priceless. Clearly, you should all start your own businesses and show them how your personal belief on how business works is the only true way, and that any other way is money-gouging evil.
(Note: You will fail.)
It's so priceless. Clearly, you should all start your own businesses and show them how your personal belief on how business works is the only true way, and that any other way is money-gouging evil.
(Note: You will fail.)
Speaking from a PvP player's perspective, when a game let's Money be a factor in how strong your pixels are against a kid with mom's credit card... there is a problem. We haven't even hit class imbalances yet and there's already a problem.
Would there have been a black market anyway without the Auction House? Most definately. But to make that into a mainstream function of the game? I'd rather not be thrown under the bus for choosing to build my character, rather than buy my character.
Would there have been a black market anyway without the Auction House? Most definately. But to make that into a mainstream function of the game? I'd rather not be thrown under the bus for choosing to build my character, rather than buy my character.
All the time. Look at all of the crappy tie-in games. Look at all of the games rushed out before they're done. Look at all of the games with badly-balanced microtransaction stores (to reiterate: D3's is a store where you can buy items from other players, which is not at all the same as being able to just hand Blizzard a check to win as in some games). If you couldn't get these items in game or you were just buying them from Blizzard and they were created out of nowhere, I would be right there with everyone, but that's not how they've suggested it's going to work and I have no problem whatsoever with what they have suggested.archont said:
I just don't think this is an example of Blizzard hurting gameplay for money. I think this is an example of Blizzard excluding a pretty marginal group of gamers in order to provide features that a lot of people want, prevent cheating, and avoid having to deal with players buying items on sketchy websites. If anything, the small fee prevents the store being flooded with useless items. The only way I can see they could still keep this quality control mechanism and perhaps alleviate the whining about them being "greedy" is to give the money away (but again, I don't have a problem with them taking it seeing as they made the game and are offering people an ability to sell their items to other players for actual money).
And the whole "games used to be about love and now they're just all about money" thing is tired and was never really true. Game developers have, by and large, always wanted to make money. The only difference is that it was just harder to do so before. Luckily, one of the ways you do that is by making good games that people want to play. The whole money-versus-love idea is a fictitious dichotomy - they often go hand in hand. Sometimes they don't, but I don't really see this as an example of that. I see this as an example of a change that disproportionately affects a certain minority of gamers and an attempt for Blizzard to (quite reasonably) get the transaction money currently going to places like ebay. And then I see everyone immediately jumping onto the "GAMES ARE ALL ABOUT MONEY NOW GREEDY BASTARDS" bandwagon.
I only read the first page, but I thought I'd chime in. Some people are calling other people fools for letting little things get in the way of a purchase of an otherwise good product, and other people are calling them out on that failure of logic. I would like to push the issue the other way and point out that I feel irritation at the people who have chosen to buy this game blindly because all you are doing is supporting the problem. Blizzard can literally put a turd in a box along side the CD-key to install the game, and they will still turn a profit for it because of the sheer numbers of customers they automatically have. Blindly buying the game despite its flaws (that do nothing to help the consumer in the end) is just giving permission to Blizzard to keep adding in those flaws intentionally. So I'm going to step out of bounds here and ask (or demand, whichever riles you up more) all of you to not buy Diablo 3 because these intentional flaws exist. Wait for them to actively patch the issue out before handing them your money, because Blizzard taking that step for us deserves a reward far more than the effort they have put into making a game.
A game is made for a profit, not to entertain us. We are just acting like starved meth-heads by buying blindly. Do not expect Blizzard to not take advantage of that.
A game is made for a profit, not to entertain us. We are just acting like starved meth-heads by buying blindly. Do not expect Blizzard to not take advantage of that.
First, none of it negatively impacts me. My connection is just about always fine. If something happens to my connection and I die, I might be angry for about a solid minute. I don't have any desire to cheat or dupe. I don't have any huge interest in mods for the game (being able to mod a game is not a prerequisite for my enjoyment, though I do enjoy a lot of mods for other games). If I want to LAN with anyone, we can all just connect to the internet as we do if we're playing, say, LoL in the same place.Dexter111 said:
And I like all of the logic behind adding an in-game auction house. Though I very much doubt that I'll use it, no part of it ruins the game in any way for me. Farming and selling of in-game items was going to happen and this way Blizzard can regulate it to prevent scamming. I have no problem with the fact that this way they get a cut instead of ebay. It might make it easier and more widespread, but that doesn't bother me in the slightest either. People like to complain that such systems give the games an unequal playing field where money equals power, but without any such system the game is massively balanced in favour of those with more spare time. For just about any such game, free time equates to power. People without a lot of leisure time can't even hope to compete. This is all disregarding the fact that, since it's primarily a cooperative game, balance doesn't matter to such a huge degree anyway.
Your discussion about buying gold is also bizarre. The auction house is by no means obligatory - it contains only items that were already found in the game. If the currency hyperinflates (ignoring the question of the degree to which that is actually likely to happen), you can just get the items in the game as usual. There is a built-in failsafe mechanism that prevents hyperinflation from ever really affecting your ability to acquire items and it's playing the game. And the hyperinflation doesn't affect item trading (either direct trading or indirect - direct is obvious and indirect since any items you have will be worth the hyperinflated price too).
An architecture where calculations are done and information is stored on central servers makes cheating harder and more easily reversible, so that already seems potentially nice. But as I said, the game is primarily cooperative, so cheating shouldn't be too huge a deal since it just means you all win harder in most situations. However, they have a much greater interest in preventing cheating with the auction house system in place because the sale of hacked items presents a potentially tremendous liability to Blizzard (since users might not know the item is hacked and the items might stop working due to an update, might be purged, etc.). So even beyond the idea just not bothering me, I see additional, completely reasonable motivation for them to do that. And once you've moved to that architecture, having an offline single player is effectively impossible (or at the very least a tremendous amount of work put in just to duplicate existing online functionality offline).
So no, none of it bothers me. And it will probably continue not to bother me regardless of how many times you repeat the same points and regardless of how many links you add (if I didn't know about any of those things, I'm pretty capable of typing them into google, but it definitely made your post look more imposing, so good job there).
I'm happy for you.Jaime_Wolf said:
But for many reasons stated in this thread others are affected. Some people have a dodgy connection, some people don't like the idea of a real money auction house polluting their fantasy gameplay experience, some people don't like any kind of DRM, some people don't like to give up their privacy or personal information just to play a damn game, and some people don't like being marketed to.
All of your statements are either [link src="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man"]Straw Man[/link] or [link src="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization"]Generalizing from Self[/link] where you state "well I don't have a problem and everyone who says they do are irrelevant".
If you can't make a logical post then please stop trolling my thread.
You have a terrible router then. Wifi is fine for online gaming. Also I dont give the ps3 much credit for being that great of a system, so that might also be your problem.
As for D2 I said that it in and of it self may not be an MMO, but its game play mechanics were copied into them. Look at WOW and tell me with a straight face they didnt copy a lot of the combat mechanics from d2.
for the best you'll probally have to.Fiz_The_Toaster said:
in D2 much of the true endgame gear had to be made, and many of the items were unable to be traded.