So, Pirates are Playing Diablo 3

[Lectori Salutem]

Actually, the server emulator that emulated the Diablo 3 beta, and is still being developed for the retail version of Diablo 3 as we speak, is open source. That being said, it has a long way to go just to be fun to use, or even work properly. And I'm not talking a week or even a month.

Open Source means you can post links with no qualms and source code is available. Until I see those I will remain doubtful.

Pirate groups don't do it as a rule rather than exception, source code for a programmer is pretty much like a movie star walking around with no make up. It takes a huge amount of balls.

I think he means mooege (something that pops up if you search on google), it's an open source server emulator, like he said.
Apparently people ran de D3 beta in it or something, I'm still looking into it.

 

[nu1mlock]

Actually, the server emulator that emulated the Diablo 3 beta, and is still being developed for the retail version of Diablo 3 as we speak, is open source. That being said, it has a long way to go just to be fun to use, or even work properly. And I'm not talking a week or even a month.

Open Source means you can post links with no qualms and source code is available. Until I see those I will remain doubtful.

Pirate groups don't do it as a rule rather than exception, source code for a programmer is pretty much like a movie star walking around with no make up. It takes a huge amount of balls.

I think he means mooege (something that pops up if you search on google), it's an open source server emulator, like he said.
Apparently people ran de D3 beta in it or something, I'm still looking into it.

Yeah, that's it. I'm guessing I wouldn't have been warned/banned for that, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

And yeah, people ran the beta using it and they're currently trying to get it to work with the current version. They haven't though. As I said, it has a long way to go, but it is in the works and it is open source.

 

[Lectori Salutem]

Yeah, that's it. I'm guessing I wouldn't have been warned/banned for that, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

And yeah, people ran the beta using it and they're currently trying to get it to work with the current version. They haven't though. As I said, it has a long way to go, but it is in the works and it is open source.

It's developed as an educational program, rather than a pirating tool, so technically you should be safe to post links etc.
If you're going to post instructions on how to illegally run a game in it (like D3), then the mods aren't going to like it.

 

[PingoBlack]

It's developed as an educational program, rather than a pirating tool, so technically you should be safe to post links etc.
If you're going to post instructions on how to illegally run a game in it (like D3), then the mods aren't going to like it.

Aye, that is Open Source and should be safe to post, as long as you don't go into detail how to make it run for D3 retail. That is a grey area and should be avoided here of course.

But it's also not necessary. The information provided was really useful even without links. Thanks folks!

 

[Darkmantle]

The RMAH could've been protected without forcing single player to be online.

Really? How so then?

people keep saying this, and yet have no idea what they are talking about. There is no way to do it. Having an offline mode, means all the data, (Including items) has to be stored on the customer computer. If the data is already on your computer, it is trivial to take the data, decrypt it, and duplicate it. This is exactly what happened in D2, and this is exactly what they aim to prevent in D3.

If you have a solution to somehow solve this dilemma, please, by all means, reveal it.

Separate characters from single player and lan from multiplayer.
There.
Have the same system you have now, for multiplayer, but have an offline single player, with different characters for each, so if you want you can play with your duped items and hax, and you can do it with your friends, provided you're all on LAN, but if you join a random multiplayer server, you won't have this issue.

Will not work, because, as I've stated, if you have that offline mode, that means all the data is stored on the client computer, and if I can access the item data, I can duplicate the items, and no amount of server checks is going to stop me. See D2 for how well this plan worked.

I'll give you a hint, not very.

 

[lapan]

I don't know why everyone hates DRM, what do you live in a cave with no internet connection? You really only play games that are offline? Or are you just pining for the old days when games weren't so popular and therefore no-one wanted to steal them? Its because we have awesome games like D3 that pirates are in business, its just a fact of life. Best thing to do is to not let them destroy good companies because a) you take the pirated version instead or b) you don't buy it because it has DRM, to stop the majority of would-be pirates.

And to those people who want to boycott games with DRM, just shut up and enjoy your games, its what they're there for.

It's because:

• 
  1. It's usually overriden in days and from that point on only inconviniences the buyers
  2. Always online DRM depends on a perfect connection on both sides, if either the server is down or your connection has problems you are shit out of luck
  3. it often is rather intrusive
  4. every second game has a different kind of drm which ends up cluttering your pc even more.

 

[lapan]

The RMAH could've been protected without forcing single player to be online.

Really? How so then?

people keep saying this, and yet have no idea what they are talking about. There is no way to do it. Having an offline mode, means all the data, (Including items) has to be stored on the customer computer. If the data is already on your computer, it is trivial to take the data, decrypt it, and duplicate it. This is exactly what happened in D2, and this is exactly what they aim to prevent in D3.

If you have a solution to somehow solve this dilemma, please, by all means, reveal it.

Separate characters from single player and lan from multiplayer.
There.
Have the same system you have now, for multiplayer, but have an offline single player, with different characters for each, so if you want you can play with your duped items and hax, and you can do it with your friends, provided you're all on LAN, but if you join a random multiplayer server, you won't have this issue.

Will not work, because, as I've stated, if you have that offline mode, that means all the data is stored on the client computer, and if I can access the item data, I can duplicate the items, and no amount of server checks is going to stop me. See D2 for how well this plan worked.

I'll give you a hint, not very.

D2 had seperate accounts for offlineplay and closed battlenet. The closed battlenet characterdata was on the servers. There was eventually duped items, but it had little to do with your offline character.

 

[katsabas]

Nah, they are not. At least not offline. Skidrow isn't done with prepping the emulation package and his last message was that they are making progress but it is difficult to get everything in the folders. There are all sorts of links over the net but most of them lead to surveys and other unrelated garbage. As for the game itself, I wanna play like crazy. I have DII on my PC but I am kind of fed up with its' weary look.

I am not one for piracy but up to a certain point. I bought DII and couldn't play it. Then I got a cracked copy. This time around, I am gonna go sideways. Pirate the game for offline and actually turn up in a store and buy it for online with my brother (when and IF Blizzard decides to give me offline functionality). Two seperate chars, more slaying, more loot, less hackers trying to get my single player stash.

For the ignorant like this guy right here,

I don't know why everyone hates DRM, what do you live in a cave with no internet connection? You really only play games that are offline? Or are you just pining for the old days when games weren't so popular and therefore no-one wanted to steal them? Its because we have awesome games like D3 that pirates are in business, its just a fact of life. Best thing to do is to not let them destroy good companies because a) you take the pirated version instead or b) you don't buy it because it has DRM, to stop the majority of would-be pirates.

And to those people who want to boycott games with DRM, just shut up and enjoy your games, its what they're there for.

the Diablo III DRM is not to protect neither your equipment, nor your gold or your character. Not even your profile. That's what the battle.net authenticator is for. DRM was installed to protect the Online Real Money Auction House. Which by the way, isn't even up yet. In order to play the game, your connection to Blizz AND Blizz's connection to you must be good. Which means that you depend on things you can't control from the get go.

 

[Darkmantle]

The RMAH could've been protected without forcing single player to be online.

Really? How so then?

people keep saying this, and yet have no idea what they are talking about. There is no way to do it. Having an offline mode, means all the data, (Including items) has to be stored on the customer computer. If the data is already on your computer, it is trivial to take the data, decrypt it, and duplicate it. This is exactly what happened in D2, and this is exactly what they aim to prevent in D3.

If you have a solution to somehow solve this dilemma, please, by all means, reveal it.

Separate characters from single player and lan from multiplayer.
There.
Have the same system you have now, for multiplayer, but have an offline single player, with different characters for each, so if you want you can play with your duped items and hax, and you can do it with your friends, provided you're all on LAN, but if you join a random multiplayer server, you won't have this issue.

Will not work, because, as I've stated, if you have that offline mode, that means all the data is stored on the client computer, and if I can access the item data, I can duplicate the items, and no amount of server checks is going to stop me. See D2 for how well this plan worked.

I'll give you a hint, not very.

D2 had seperate accounts for offlineplay and closed battlenet. The closed battlenet characterdata was on the servers. There was eventually duped items, but it had little to do with your offline character.

It had a large part to do with all the item data being easily accessible to hackers though. Whether or not a char is made offline is irrelevant to the fact that if I have the data on my computer, finding a way to duplicate it is now 100 times easier.

This is simply because I have the data, it's like having the source code for items.

 

[chstens]

I never said it would be used to properly emulate D3 as it's supposed to be played, but I also take it you've never heard of SWGEmu, a community attempting to (very succesfully, so far) make a proper Pre-CU Star Wars Galaxies server emulator.

I would not have the same doubts if we were talking open source community project, I truly wouldn't. Open source is something intrinsically different.

It is also something pirates wouldn't do. The competitive nature of those comunities pretty much excludes any notion of open sharing.

Just wanted to post that as many probably never even heard about the gameplay issues of pirate servers for WoW, it's really not general knowledge outside people using the servers and more obscure gaming places. Mainstream gaming media does't carry any stories about that.

I have played on a few WoW private servers, put shortly, it've been an experience. Some are just clusterfucks of homebrew content and 100X exp and gold, while others have actually been standard WoW with a few new additions, one server had guild airships, which was neat.

 

[GasparNolasco]

Meh. I'm yet to understand why are people so moved for this 12 year old isometric point-and-clickfest. I sincerely wouldn't even pirate that game. Why botter with a standard incomplete dungeon crawler packed full of DRM, when I can play RPGs that trully evolved like Skyrim, Dark Souls or Witcher 2?

 

[ReaperOne1Two2]

I am surprised that this thread didn't get deleted a long time ago considering the OP has no clue what he was talking about when he posted it. As of right now there is still no pirated version crack, emulated server, etc...

Basically the drm if it does get cracked anytime with quality it served its entire purpose. Chances are if pirates didn't buy it in the month+ for a basic functioning version that is super degraded in quality, they would have never bought it until its on sale or something. The bonus side is how it is stopping hackers by quite a bit.

Actually, the server emulator that emulated the Diablo 3 beta, and is still being developed for the retail version of Diablo 3 as we speak, is open source. That being said, it has a long way to go just to be fun to use, or even work properly. And I'm not talking a week or even a month.

Open Source means you can post links with no qualms and source code is available. Until I see those I will remain doubtful.

Pirate groups don't do it as a rule rather than exception, source code for a programmer is pretty much like a movie star walking around with no make up. It takes a huge amount of balls.

I'm not posting the link since use of it might be illegal in various countries and I don't want a warning or even a ban from here.

It's also worth noting that it's not the "regular" pirate groups (as Reloaded or Skidrow for example) who's working on the emulator, it's regular folks with enough skills to help out.

I'm not supporting it in any way, I'm happily playing my retail copy of Diablo 3, I'm just saying it's in the works and it is open source.

If I am to post a link to, say, their wiki (no way to download anything from the wiki itself), I'd like it confirmed by a moderator first. Just in case.

But I assure you, it is open source, the source is available through GitHub. I know you won't take my word on it, but since I might not be allowed to link to their wiki, I'll just say it's fairly easy to do a google search and find it pretty quick.

He couldn't even get it working for beta for the most part, it had no working quests basically, a lot of mobs just stood there glitched, a lot of skills just didn't work or didn't use energy due to bugs, it was capped at level 9, and it didn't reliably save characters. This is with no where near an amount of players that matter. The fact the forums has 316 threads about problems and the rest of the forum has 57 for everything else related even off topic should tell you something.

There won't be a functioning emulator with even decent quality for quite a long time. Compound this with the fact if the dev keeps anything server side he/them will have to shell out some serious cash for the pirates(Which since the game did so well there are A LOT of them).

 

[nu1mlock]

He couldn't even get it working for beta for the most part, it had no working quests basically, a lot of mobs just stood there glitched, a lot of skills just didn't work or didn't use energy due to bugs, it was capped at level 9, and it didn't reliably save characters. This is with no where near an amount of players that matter. The fact the forums has 316 threads about problems and the rest of the forum has 57 for everything else related even off topic should tell you something.

There won't be a functioning emulator with even decent quality for quite a long time. Compound this with the fact if the dev keeps anything server side he/them will have to shell out some serious cash for the pirates(Which since the game did so well there are A LOT of them).

You pretty much said exactly what I said a few pages back.

The emulator doesn't even currently work, and as you said it was incomplete and buggy as hell during the beta. Which, of course, isn't surprising at all - emulating Diablo 3 will be a pain in the ass.

All I was saying is that it is open source, not that it's good or even worth thinking about.

I personally love the game so much I went out to buy another two copies for friends today (one for a friend that just got back from the hospital, and another for a broke friend), which gets me to a total of five copies. Considering the amount of fun we have (and will) get out of it, it is absolutely worth it.

Only downside is of course that we're limited to four people in a game and we're now five friends that wants to play.

 

[evilneko]

The RMAH could've been protected without forcing single player to be online.

Really? How so then?

people keep saying this, and yet have no idea what they are talking about. There is no way to do it. Having an offline mode, means all the data, (Including items) has to be stored on the customer computer. If the data is already on your computer, it is trivial to take the data, decrypt it, and duplicate it. This is exactly what happened in D2, and this is exactly what they aim to prevent in D3.

If you have a solution to somehow solve this dilemma, please, by all means, reveal it.

Separate characters from single player and lan from multiplayer.
There.
Have the same system you have now, for multiplayer, but have an offline single player, with different characters for each, so if you want you can play with your duped items and hax, and you can do it with your friends, provided you're all on LAN, but if you join a random multiplayer server, you won't have this issue.

Will not work, because, as I've stated, if you have that offline mode, that means all the data is stored on the client computer, and if I can access the item data, I can duplicate the items, and no amount of server checks is going to stop me. See D2 for how well this plan worked.

I'll give you a hint, not very.

D2 had seperate accounts for offlineplay and closed battlenet. The closed battlenet characterdata was on the servers. There was eventually duped items, but it had little to do with your offline character.

It had a large part to do with all the item data being easily accessible to hackers though. Whether or not a char is made offline is irrelevant to the fact that if I have the data on my computer, finding a way to duplicate it is now 100 times easier.

This is simply because I have the data, it's like having the source code for items.

Cheating in offline mode is irrelevant, since it only affects the one player who's doing it.

Having offline character data available wouldn't help much, but having the necessary compiled code to run offline might. While yes, a hacker could reverse engineer the binaries in an attempt to find bugs that may allow duplication (or some other undesirable behavior), there's no guarantee it'd work online--they'd still need to find some way to exploit the bug online.

 

[GasparNolasco]

Well, if you compare how much the Elder Scrolls series evolved with how much the Diablo series evolved in the past years, you will see Skyrim is pretty much well evolved in comparisson with D3.

And I've seem enough gameplay videos and reviews of Diablo to know how it is.

 

[GasparNolasco]

There's still Dark Souls and Witcher there, any point against those?

 

[General Twinkletoes]

The RMAH could've been protected without forcing single player to be online.

Really? How so then?

people keep saying this, and yet have no idea what they are talking about. There is no way to do it. Having an offline mode, means all the data, (Including items) has to be stored on the customer computer. If the data is already on your computer, it is trivial to take the data, decrypt it, and duplicate it. This is exactly what happened in D2, and this is exactly what they aim to prevent in D3.

If you have a solution to somehow solve this dilemma, please, by all means, reveal it.

Separate characters from single player and lan from multiplayer.
There.
Have the same system you have now, for multiplayer, but have an offline single player, with different characters for each, so if you want you can play with your duped items and hax, and you can do it with your friends, provided you're all on LAN, but if you join a random multiplayer server, you won't have this issue.

Will not work, because, as I've stated, if you have that offline mode, that means all the data is stored on the client computer, and if I can access the item data, I can duplicate the items, and no amount of server checks is going to stop me. See D2 for how well this plan worked.

I'll give you a hint, not very.

No, only the singleplayer characters are stored on the computer. Have the system as it is now, with a lot of server side stuff, but have only singleplayer characters on the computer. That way, people can play single player if they want, the RMAH won't be broken, random groups won't be joined by hackers, but you can still spawn and dupe items if you just want to be ridiculous in singleplayer or lan.

Of course you don't have all the data on the computer, only SP characters.

 

[lowhat]

Why botter with a standard incomplete dungeon crawler packed full of DRM, when I can play RPGs that trully evolved like Skyrim, Dark Souls or Witcher 2?

Fucking lol.

Pretty much. Laughable that people think that Skyrim isn't devolution from what the series was a decade ago.

 

[Darkmantle]

The RMAH could've been protected without forcing single player to be online.

Really? How so then?

people keep saying this, and yet have no idea what they are talking about. There is no way to do it. Having an offline mode, means all the data, (Including items) has to be stored on the customer computer. If the data is already on your computer, it is trivial to take the data, decrypt it, and duplicate it. This is exactly what happened in D2, and this is exactly what they aim to prevent in D3.

If you have a solution to somehow solve this dilemma, please, by all means, reveal it.

Separate characters from single player and lan from multiplayer.
There.
Have the same system you have now, for multiplayer, but have an offline single player, with different characters for each, so if you want you can play with your duped items and hax, and you can do it with your friends, provided you're all on LAN, but if you join a random multiplayer server, you won't have this issue.

Will not work, because, as I've stated, if you have that offline mode, that means all the data is stored on the client computer, and if I can access the item data, I can duplicate the items, and no amount of server checks is going to stop me. See D2 for how well this plan worked.

I'll give you a hint, not very.

No, only the singleplayer characters are stored on the computer. Have the system as it is now, with a lot of server side stuff, but have only singleplayer characters on the computer. That way, people can play single player if they want, the RMAH won't be broken, random groups won't be joined by hackers, but you can still spawn and dupe items if you just want to be ridiculous in singleplayer or lan.

Of course you don't have all the data on the computer, only SP characters.

Only the singleplayer characters are stored eh? So not the monster data, world data, item and drop data, generation tables, npc data, shop data is NOT on the client machine when running an offline char? Because without those, your character would be floating forever in a big white void.

All that HAS to be stored on the client computer IF you are to be able to run it without connecting to the server. Again, giving easier access to hackers.

EDIT: misread something, but let me clarify, the way you said it should work, IT DOES WORK THAT WAY. You can play single player, but you need to be connected to the server to get all the other data! Your plan would in no way alleviate the server issues caused by D3s launch, it would basically be the same load on the servers, so I don;t see how this is a solution to the server issues.