Blizzard Remains Unyielding on Diablo 3′s Always-Online Requirement
Posted 8 August 2011 by FluxDebate over the always-only, MMO-esque requirement of Diablo III continues to simmer (45% dislike or hate, out of over 6000 votes in our poll), though I don’t know if anyone’s really changing their mind with all the arguments each way. Blizzard certainly doesn’t seem to be doing so, and from their comments about the entire game’s programming architecture being predicated on a client-server model for security, it seems like they must have been working towards this solution for a long time. (Casting some doubt on the truthfulness of Bashiok’s past equivocations on the issue.)
Blascid posted a long and heartfelt plea against the always-online requirement, with lots of quotes and citations from other arguments. Bashiok replied… without giving an inch.
This is not too unlike World of Warcraft where the world itself, the art, the sounds, etc. are on your machine, but all of the NPC’s and enemies are controlled by the server. Diablo III doesn’t function in all of the exact same ways, but things like monster randomization, dungeon randomization, item drops, the outcomes of combat, among others, are all handled and verified by the client talking to the server, and vice versa.
We’ve learned a lot from this type of architecture from World of Warcraft, and the added security and oversight it provides. It allows a great deal of control over the game at all times for all players, so if we know there’s an issue or bug we can usually address it right then and there through a live hotfix. Hotfixes can’t be used for everything, we’re still going to have client patches, but we’re definitely looking forward to being able to deliver a consistently high quality experience to all players simultaneously through processes like hotfixes.
In addition there are some pretty intense security concerns. While there’s never a fool proof solution to stopping hack and cheats, we’ve found that a strict client/server architecture is a huge barrier for their development and use.
Ultimately we made the decision to make the game client/server based because of the security and quality it can provide to those playing, and as a bonus it reinforces a lot of our ideals for a thriving online community.
So it seems like this is how it’s going to be. Perhaps if the community had been almost entirely opposed to this scheme, as was the case with the mandatory Real ID on the forums, Blizzard might have reconsidered. But with at least 50% of fans supportive, or at least not opposed to the always-only requirement, it seems like it’s going to be here to stay.
Unless/until some clever hackers find a way to break the code and enable single player offline mode, in what would surely be the most popular Diablo game “mod” of all time.
I just thought I would mention that there is no single player campaign in this game. Just because a game can be played or finished with one player does not mean it was designed or intended to be so. Blizzard decided this was going to be a multiplayer only game, and people need to come to grips with it and just play it, or buy another game. All this nonsense about illegal hacks needs to stop, because it is never okay, despite what you THINK a game should or should not be.
Is that why Wyatt Cheng just did an interview saying that he tunes the game for those who want to play alone, as well as those who want to play with other people?
But what does he know.
Maybe it’s because single player has nothing to do with offline-mode?
P.S. People can’t read probably. It was repeated like 100 times: it’s already late to change that decision.
It has been said multiple times that you will be able to play offline yourself.
Check out this link
http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/blue-on-online-single-player-diablo-iii
so basically there was still an OPTION to play the game offline, although that seems to get them up their nose that players even wants to do that. But at least they are grudgingly offering the option.
Pffff the more I read about the comments of the blue, the more it makes me want to hurl. It just goes to show that they are having the Apple mentality now – do it our way or no way.
and more importantly, YOU youself are the one who mentioned that there is NO single player campaign and Risingred was just answering your incomplete question, so who is the one that look silly now?
“All this nonsense about illegal hacks needs to stop, because it is never okay, despite what you THINK a game should or should not be.”
It always cracks me up, what people get on their high-horse about. All the crap we have going on in the world, and yet such a vehement response to someone buying a game and applying a “crack” that, by definition (severing them from online play), won’t effect a single other player (it will just leave Blizzard with a single revenue stream (the game sale), like most every other game ever made). Blizzard should be so lucky if players chose to buy the game before cracking it, as, with most entertainment these days, the vast majority skip the buying part.
I don’t even care, only thing I have is a badass desktop and its always connected to the internet and maybe once in a blue moon i would get a DC. So bring on the Diablo Goodness!
its funny how polarized people are here… people are voting you down just because you said you have an internet connection and you’re excited to play this game =\
actually I think he was voted down because he is saying that he basically don’t care about the opinion and plight of others simply because he have his own stable connection …
If you can read this, you don’t have an offline problem.
(actually in all honesty I think this is one of those things where blizz should probably TRY and meet some of these people half way)
really guys -10?
try reading what I put in parentheses. Geez, no one can take a joke around here anymore.
Well, don’t blame them. Because Blizzard is (in a way) destroying the Diablo tradition, they are really pissed and touchy, that’s why even a joke will not go unpunished. Thank Blizzard for treating us only like money making crap.
It’s so easy to hate the big bad company when they do something different, isn’t it? But let’s not forget about Blizz’s foresight to see into the future. D2 is still relevant 10 years later, but the scene is pretty different. Where are we going to be in 10 years? Just a guess, but interwebz is probably going to be accessible almost anywhere. I know that the single player community is being touchy, but they don’t have to be irrational .
Well, i’ve been through many topics here lately and to my mind the SP-affiliated faction of community (myself included) proposed quite rational arguments pro SP, while also refuting many contrarguments of Blizzard. What is left is Blizzard’s lame line of excusing itself for lying to us, employing another lie while ‘happy pr-making’. Nobody likes to be treated like an idiot, that’s why people have the right to feel offended and have the right to feel rage.
Thing is, here is why I still play Diablo II-
It was a well designed game with great mechanics, that is fun to play from almost the minute you pick it up. We HOPE Diablo III delivers on that.
Using things such as ATMA, I have been able to maintain the accomplishments I had from that game, even when coming back to it on new PCs, new installations, with gaps of a year or more in-between. This is the advantage they claim the always online gives, only even easier and without 3rd party software. And it will, as long as they choose for it to do so. Just like online backups, it’s theoretically the ‘best option’, except in reality it is taking ALL of the control out of your hands. Your data/ character stops becoming available for your use the moment they choose for it to do so, or go out of business. You may think this a moot point because you ‘trust’ blizzard and don’t expect either of those things to happen, but I didn’t think Blizzard would merge with the devil that is Activision, and certainly would have never imagined them making the decisions they are making 6 years ago. Forgive me if my trust is lacking.
Cheats and Mods. Cheats to test the viability of high end builds, then if they’re viable seeing if I can do it- get through the whole game with that build and get to my desired uber combination. Diablo 3′s freespecs mean I just get my new build, instantly, and remove any reason to replay the game with my new concept. Meanwhile, the 10 char limit means even if I wanted to for some crazy reason, I have a severe limit on my ability to replay. I get my maxed out char of each class, and only 5 more slots to mess with. Mods stretch out the value of the game. They make even a decade old game a new experience. In many cases, they are responsible for people still playing the game YEARS after it otherwise would have been old hat (DOTA, Median), and for others they provide a welcome change of pace before returning to the game they love, stretching out the dedicated playtime of those hardcore fans of the game. They are specifically being prevented with this setup. We’re not being ALLOWED to experience anything that might be possible with this engine, because if anything else is going to be done that’s fun with this engine, darn it, Blizzard wants to be able to charge us for it.
There’s always one more crazy thing to try. Whether it’s that one piece of gear to make possible some off the wall build (the concept of allowing another class’s powers to be available through use of items has been, AFAIK, determined to NOT be included), some sub-optimal Stat combo to try (a pure DEX Bowazon, a base stat guardian, etc, none of which will exist with autostats), a new synergy build (no skill points), or some off the wall concept (sorc hammerer, etc, severely limited by class specific weaponry), there was always something that you HAD to see if it will work. Blizzard claims they value this, but every decision made by them move in the opposite direction, and I don’t see what will be left to try, or to be different, once you’ve experienced the core gameplay as intended, which is obviously what Blizzard is all about.
The reasons I still play it after all this time, basically, is because it’s MY game, to do with what I want and to play around with and in, even all these years later. With everything Blizzard has done, they have made it very clear that Diablo 3 will be THEIR game, not ours. We will have the Privilege of playing it. Even if I do choose to do so, I just can’t see why I would still be playing it years later. The respect I have for Blizzard COMES from their games still being worth playing, years later. With WOW they merely punished you for coming back to their game years later with a constant vertical expansion system. With Diablo 3, I am not seeing any reason you would do so. Previous decisions had given the SP, LAN, and Mod support for the game community (by far the most active portions of Diablo 2) the finger. The recent decisions make it all to clear it’s more than that- it’s a bullying kid, saying “no, this is my sandbox, and you can only play in it if I let you and in the way I let you”. That leaves a lot of people not wanting to play at all.
Mmm yes, but only as long as the server is up. What will happen to your beloved game when the server is shut down? And with Kotick in charge of activision and having so much influence on the corporate culture, do you think that they will even bother to do the right thing as steam and promise to release the game code for the games and allow everyone to play it offline if they even goes belly up?
Hardly likely. And don’t forget, the way the code it is going to make it very difficult to recode it for offline play only, especially if the company is on the verge of collapse. So basically you are out of luck of the company goes bankrupt.
It is not because big company is easy to hate that Blizzard garner so much hate. It is because they have made a series of really questionable decisions which seems to be gears towards forcing people to play in a certain way AND towards profit maximisation only. Please do not insult the intelligence of the posters here.
It sucks for me cos of my location and work-related travel etc, but it looks like I don’t really have a choice. Its either no D3, or D3 when I can, and i’ll be taking the second option.
I really don’t understand what is work got to do with playing D3. If you have to travel alot then D3 is not an option…just like Wow and Starcraft. There are some games that are all online oriented so…what can one do.
But one has to put in balance all issues – because if they make from D3 what they did with SC 2 or WOW concerning safety, speed of addressing issues, and quality of gaming in general without all bot spam we have in D2 atm etc…then I will go for only online for sure.
On the other hand I am sure there will be an offline version as well just like it is for SC2 atm…that is talking off record
I travel for weeks at a time, I can take my laptop to whittle away hours in boring rural motel rooms but I don’t have internet access for online gaming. Oh well, i guess i can just continue my affair with mrs palmer and her 5 daughters
And I don’t have a laptop good enought to play D3. So what? Everything is just a matter of money. If you travel a lot I believe you can find a way to get to free or cheap Wi-Fi.
honestly, can you please stop being such a fanboy and try to see someone else’s point of view.
this is a guy who obviously wants to play the game, but because of how his life is at the moment won’t be able to play as much as he would like. Yet he will still buy the game. His point his valid, stop attacking him just because you feel this urge to defend everything blizzard does.
i swear, all these people screaming “just get broadband you noob” have a complete lack of empathy. Look outside your little box, a lot of people don’t have access to broadband internet.
yep cheers iba – I live in New Zealand where there are vast swathes of land where there is no connection possible.
But yeah I see this is the way it is, and I will buy it and enjoy it… and I am actually saving to buy a laptop capable of running it in time for the release
I don’t play WoW, I don’t play Starcraft II. Right now, I play Torchlight and Diablo/Diablo II. I wanna play Diablo 3, but it looks like, as the gentleman above me stated, I’ll have to play when I can. Which sucks.
Time to learn about the wonderful world of cracks Rumpelstilzchen.
This is a very good response from Bashiok. They have clearly opted for “online only” early in the development, so it would take alot of work to go back and rewrite the single player game code. So, even if some people do not like it, it won’t change for the initial release, at least. Personally, I think they’ve made the right decision.
It wasnt that early, cause he said last year that there would be an offline sp option for those who need it.
Maybe they started with the online-only code, and then less than a year ago they determined that it would be better if they would stick with online-only so they would not have to code the single player only portion of the game, and in addition they would benefit from all the security features of that architecture.
And please tell us, which part of having an offline single player feature will impact the security of the online BNet player community?
My understanding is that Bnet hackers/cheaters/dupers/scum were/are able to use portions of the single player code to cheat/hack/dupe Bnet. By not having a singer player mode it makes it somewhat more difficult to cheat/hack/dupe Bnet.
I also read somewhere that a portion of the listing/sell fees from the RMAH will go to fund a team to specifically combat botting/farming.
I seriously doubt that there is no save on your computer at all… and even if there isn’t all they’d have to do is make one and switch some address stuff around so the game finds it… it’s not really that much effort that it would require months of work, and they haven;t even announced a beta date yet…
Sorry no. This game will act like WoW. Your save is on the server, not on your pc.
@Random
At least this is how it is being planned. Data was saved on the local client for D2 in case the internet went down, so that they can recover the data from the client side. Yes, this was even for the BNet character. So this led to duping. So now they are proposing that all character info, all interaction, all AI be controlled from the server side and actions from the client side have to be authenticated every time.
Other than leading to higher amount of traffic requirement through your local wifi/network, this also means that if you drop from internet for whatever reason, you can easily die unless blizzard cut off the game immediately at that point. And being on server side means that it will not retrieve a save from your local client and it might need to wait till your local client loses all connection and wait for a second or two before it starts the count down to disconnect you from the server.
Now all these are conjecture on my part as I am not part of the team, but it seems to be the most logical and safest way of going about it. But this also means that your actions on the client side during these periods of bad connection will not be recorded and it might easily lead to periods of 10, 20 seconds of inactivity as far as the server is concerned, which will almost certainly lead to your character’s death, unless you are a high level character playing at a low level area at that time.
Too many changes, personally. I don’t think I will give them my 60$. I have access to an internet connection, but I like to play games on my own terms. There are other games coming that I can use to pull me away from reality.
And I still have a cabinet full of booze which helps :aie:
The problem is half arrogance, half disconnect with the community. He failed to respond to my post which was a bit more…cutting, but still civil.
I like the Blizzard response of “What about those who will be left unable to play?” basically saying “gfy”.
Two things:
1. I’ve noticed that many people who don’t mind the change feel they won’t be affected by it, so they just don’t care. They don’t care if other people will be affected, so they’re fine with it. If it were something they cared about, then you’d sure be hearing about it, though.
2. The argument for it is incredibly weak due to Blizzard’s complete lack of ability to curb the problems that plague their online games.
They made D3 an MMO to curtail hacking, botting, scamming, spamming, etc. But all of these things are present in WoW. Do you know what they’ve done about it? Jack. They haven’t even done anything about RMT. They are completely powerless to stop it, either due to lack of talent, ambition, motivation, or all of the above. And WoW is what Blizzard is basing their security on for D3. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so depressing.
Blizzard on buying gold.
Bots in WoW.
Hacks in WoW. (Okay, linked removed on that one because it actually shows you a forum for hacks in WoW)
Accounts hacked. Now with more RMT-info stored in your bnet account!
I think I’ve made my point, but regrettably, nobody will care or listen. This is what we’re paying the price for: delayed mediocrity.
Oh, and “Unless/until some clever hackers find a way to break the code and enable single player offline mode, in what would surely be the most popular Diablo game “mod” of all time.”
They will, and it won’t take long. It’s called a private server.
Too true, Reloaded or Razor1911 will smash single player open like a ripe watermelon on Gallagher’s stage.
Nah, it won’t be them. It’ll be the same people who make private servers for every other online game.
Note that I do not condone using these. I am buying the game, regardless of how much the development team seems intent on making me not want to do so.
I agree with most things you’ve said about all these recent changes Red, but that just made me laugh.
I would be less upset about this no-offline crap if they actually stopped the PR bull**** and gave us straight answers. But hey, this is 2011 Blizzard, not 1999 Blizzard.
Even worse, this is 2011 “Activision Blizzard”…
Perhaps, but perhaps not. It took almost a full year after SC2 came out for a viable battle.net alternative found the light of day, and many fans were sure it would only be a matter of weeks.
It will take a while i rate. It took the hackers nearly a year to emulate SC2. And most of the data for that is client side.
To emulate D3, someone will need to more or less code the system that makes randomize in the dungeons. Also code the system that makes the items. Even if someone DOES end up doing all of this. Do you think they code as well as blizzards team that get paid $$$$ to do the job right ?
Even emulated WoW is weaker than its real counterpart. And nothing about wow is random etc, much easier to emulate.
This ultimately comes down to security. Everything else is simply a justification or “nice side-effect” of their decision.
Diablo 2 runs in a client/server model. When you play offline, both the client and server are running on your PC. This server code is probably 95% the same as what runs on Battle.net. This means hackers and others who are interested in how b.net works to create cracks, can host the game on their own computer and slowly tease apart how it works. Then they can craft new attacks to use against battle.net, exploiting bugs and loopholes in the functionality.
In Diablo 3, the server code runs only on battle.net, never on your local computer. This makes it much more difficult to hack.
Hellgate also ran in a client/server mode, however it was evident from the way they released patches for multiplayer only and not single player, that there were some significant differences between the code bases (or maybe they just had limited testing resources and couldn’t verify a single player version).
Could Blizzard have implemented Diablo 3 differently, so that they could have an offline version that worked significantly differently from the online one? Sure, but that would effectively be creating the game twice, and would take far far longer to create, not to mention nightmares of fixing different sets of bugs, or the same bug caused by slightly different behaviour in the different platforms.
All this means there is unlikely to be a cracked version that allows offline play – it will essentially be the same as writing the private battle.net servers that exist for WoW. I don’t play WoW, but I understand that these servers are very restricted on the amount of the game that they support, and haven’t kept up with the expansions at all. It was also several years until they first started coming out, and that’s for a game that has millions of players so there was demand for it. Playing on the 3rd party servers let you play without paying the subscription – but as there is no subscription required for Diablo 3, it seems unlikely anyone is going to go to the effort of making an offline version.
Nice side-effect?
You know who isn’t affected at all by bots, scammers, hackers, cheaters, item buyers, and the like?
People who play offline.
Right. But like it or not this game is built to be a better multi-player experience than Diablo 2. And to do that, they have to increase security. And to do that, to be able to provide instantaneous hotfixes, offline mode has to be excluded.
The root poster, Lanthanide, is entirely correct. For you to get your online play means we become plagued with hacks, and we lose the ability to have these things hotfixed before they become a problem.
All of this is going to happen regardless. It’s just a matter of time.
There must have been a better compromise.
It’s so funny how “veterans” complain about offline mode. I highly doubt you could play D2 everywhere when it came out (or even D1). Cheap and stable connection is just a matter of time.
well, it is not that hard to provide an OFFLINE single character that do not access the BNet, a bit like what they did in D2. Isn’t it?
And more importantly, all the hack, bot and what not in D2 close BNet server have little to do with the creation of single character. It has more to do with how blizzard program the files to accommodate the uncertainty of the net and kept a set of data on the client side.
What they should do is write a tighter code and come up with a way to handle the data for the BNet ONLINE character, and not to just kill off the offline single player character. Do not confuse the issue here.
By ‘nice side effect’, I meant their justifications such as “this way people don’t get confused when they make offline characters and can’t play them online”. Even hotfix patches are a nice side effect of this system.
As Flux notes below, such justifications makes it seem like Blizzard are either idiots themselves, or treating us like idiots.
I’ll also point out that the RMT auction house is another reason why they have to take hacks very seriously this time – any cracked or hacked items entering the economy are going to really make people furious. Now the RMT auction house in itself is in response to customer demand – players in D2 and WoW demanded ways to trade items for real money, so they used whatever means available to do this such as ebay and other websites. Blizzard have noted the demand (and that such behaviour is going to happen regardless of what they do) and so are catering for it themselves. This gets them a revenue stream, as well as providing a service to the customer that is superior to the ad-hoc methods used in D2/WoW, but at the same time because it is now supported by Blizzard, they have additional responsibilities that they wouldn’t have had.
I’d suggest that when Bashiok said we could play offline, they probably hadn’t formally decided on the RMT auction house. But once that decision is made, you really have to insure as top-notch security as possible. This means sacrificing offline mode. This decision is easy to make when you weigh up the positives (RMT auction house – good for (some) players, good for revenue) vs the negatives (lack of offline play will only lose them a small porportion of sales, people may complain and play the game less but they’ll still buy it).
Will there be hacks and cracks? Almost certainly. But hopefully they will take a lot longer to get off the ground, proliferate, won’t be as severe and if Blizzard is pro-active hopefully they can hotfix them within days of them being detected. Having the game being online-only means punishment for hacking leaves you with a game you can’t play at all.
[quote]But once that decision is made, you really have to insure as top-notch security as possible. This means sacrificing offline mode.[/quote]
Why so? You really can’t get a SP char or items on BNet in D2, why not the same model in D3? Auction would be a BNet only thing.
Read my original comment. I explain why they are using a different model in D3 to D2.
The fact is, they MUST use a different model in D3 than they did in D2 if they want to have a chance to stop hacks. The specific model they have chosen (no offline at all) is a very robust way to do this, but it’s possible there are other methods. I’m sure Blizzard weighed up all the options and made the decision they felt was best (note that they exist to make money, so what is best for them in terms of money may not be best for players).
Lets face it – They pay Bashiok to make us look like idiots. All part of a corporate rat’s day at work.
Yeah, lets ruin the game for 80% of the playerbase who don’t mind playing online.
If bliz made replies like Lanth’s, I think there would less controversy and argument. We might not like it, and we might debate the technical issues, but at least there’s a concrete, factual reason given. Security. Hacks. Etc.
For me at least, a lot of my urge to argue about it is their PR happy talk about enhanced player experience, and allegorical stories about people too clueless to notice the “single Player” and “multi player” buttons upon character creation.
Just be honest. “We’re taking away a feature that a lot of you wanted, for security reasons. If you don’t like it don’t buy the game.” Not, “you didn’t really want that feature, you’ll like it more without it anyway, and most of you are too dumb to use it properly anyhow.”
Thats a good point. They could have sounded a little less like typical PR and been a little more transparent. They’re making, in their mind, a small sacrifice for their greater good.
But they aren’t going to stop anything that they claimed they’re going to by making it online-only. Which is the insanity around this entire thing.
All they’re doing is delaying the inevitable, so when the game is out and fresh it looks real good to the public. It won’t take long for the bots, and after the bots the hacks, and the entire time there’ll be the spammers and scammers there exploiting every possible little exploit. In and out of game.
Yeah, I’m in lock step with Flux here. Personally, it’s not a big deal for me. However, Blizzard hasn’t been honest about this and for some time now apparently. They kept saying “player experience…blah…blah…blah” and when it all boiled down, just in the past couple days, guess what it’s a client / server game that by design cannot be played offline (at least unless they choose to build and support a local server!). This was brand new information that had never been brought into the conversation until everyone expressed disappointment in their “decision”.
We are going to play and love Diablo 3, no question there, but Blizzard has lost some of my respect over this. I know companies guard the information they release, in order to keep people from creating mountains out of every little issue, but in this case they have been flat-out “lying” to their fan-base on this very important issue for who knows how long! Had they just been up front about this, it would have been an easier pill to swallow and I’m sure it would have passed much more quickly than this will.
Not, “you didn’t really want that feature, you’ll like it more without it anyway, and most of you are too dumb to use it properly anyhow.”
Yes. This is the part that pissed me off as well. I can live with the changes (though, contrary to popular opinion, there will be other options, community provided, and they won’t take years), but don’t tell me that you’re doing it for me, and laugh at the thought that some players may not agree. I don’t know if it’s the arrogance, desperation of cluelessness of those arguments that bothered me most.
I would have to disagree with Flux. The messages that are going out from Blizzard are intended to communicate their stance to the entire potential playerbase of D3 and the press (official and unofficial). As such there is a need to keep the content as simple as possible, while still providing a possitive sound (this is PR after all). It wouldn’t look very well if Blizzard said something like: ‘Such and such is needed because we expect D3 to become the biggest target of hackers since the Chinese found the Pentagon website’.
Not only wouldn’t it help one bit to create understanding for the measure with the majority of their potential playerbase, it would also generate a whole slew of articles with the wrong negative content a few months before release, which is a potential PR nightmare. Of course there still are negative articles, but those Blizzard can counter with messages like the one in the article above.
And as such I am quite disappointed in the D3 community and some of its ‘leading’ figures. It wasn’t that difficult to deduce the reasons for the ‘always online’ requirement. Yet a lot of the community acted like they couldn’t quite grasp the reason, or acted just plain irrational.
Does that make the decision a good one? Personally I understand their reasoning and am glad that Blizzard will take D3′s security most serious. Unfortunately it is a reality that such a measure is necessary to guarantee the integrity of a game (and please, anyone saying that this isn’t true hasn’t been keeping up with technology). On the other hand I can also understand why some people (but only those with patchy Internet connections) will not like this measure. And I do sympathize with them and hope that there may be found an acceptable solution in the future.
You’ve got a point, and it relates to the perpetual issue of Bliz making and marketing D3 largely for a casual audience. Not that we hardcore fans won’t enjoy it, but there’s never yet been a feature introduced as “this is kind of complicated and tricky, but it’ll really improve the game.” Everything is simplified, clarified, noob-friendly, etc. And the same with their PR; with the facebook and twitter and explanations that are meant to appeal to casuals and people who aren’t really watching D3 that closely yet.
But at the same time, there’s the sort of explanation Rob Pardo gives to the WSJ, or Jay Wilson gives to Wired, or they put in an “exclusive” interview on Blizzard.com… and then there’s what Bashiok tells us via the B.net D3 forum. I think it would be nice if they could kind of level with us via the more private medium of their CM talking right to fans. Instead of Bashiok just rephrasing the same PR-approved happy talk.
That’s because like 70% people here can’t even see difference between SP and offline-mode.
There was no “you didn’t really want that feature”, they just tell they find online-only the best way to keep player experience “up to date”. To be honest it’s much easier for them.
So I see no point for Blizz to write every message that way “Barb’s high tier skills got 2 mins cooldowns. SO SHUT THE F*CK UP. If you don’t like it – don’t buy the game”. It’s just obvious and it’s how the market everywhere works: vote with your wallet.
Great conversation skills: your arguments are infantile, trite, and dull as hell. once you’re out of arguments you just go offending people. Great job Mr. #1 Fan
“Always only” – did spellcheck get the best of you?
It’s kind of appropriate though.
It’s funny; I posted this in about 3 minutes right before recording the Auction House podcast, just so there would be something fresh on the site all afternoon. And I glanced back 2 hours later after the podcast, and skimmed the comments before heading out to the gym and then to dinner. Not until many hours later (now) did I actually load the main page up and look at it, and at that point I was like, “Always-only?”
So then I had to look down the comments to see if anyone had noticed.
One of the past podcast news posts I had “thorugh” instead of “through” or something like that, and didn’t notice it until a day later, since FF doesn’t spellcheck words in the subject field of wordpress. That wouldn’t have helped on this one anyway, since nothing was misspelled. Likely I thought “online-only” and “always-online” and somehow merged them.
And if that’s the worst typo you see today on the Interwebs…
I’ll educate again. This is about keeping everyone online to push the RMAH fees when you put up items. They will no way change this because it is going to be a big money maker for them in Asia. Money > fans.
don’t you think its a little more complicated than just RMAH? Clearly, there are many facets to this issue.
Not really. All other issues are tangent, collateral “benefits”. Do you really think that, after announcing to their investors that they came up with a way for two revenue streams, it was ever again going to be any other way? “Sorry, folks, but the microtransactions were just compromising game play too much, so we had to ditch it.” Never going to happen. Someday the numbers on the RMAH will be released/leak, and will settle this on the spot. All the negative votes in the world won’t change economics, I’m sorry to say.
I think people read too much into it. I think this is all about the money.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBS0OWGUidc