Jay Wilson Suggests “Erm… upgrade the wiring in your house?”
Posted 22 August 2011 by RushsterThe fact that Diablo 3 is online only with no offline mode caused quite a debate when it was announced on 1 August and Jay was probed again by PCGamer on the issue. When asked what a player should do if their wiring is faulty in the house (we think they mean a bad connection) Jay responded with:
I don’t think the connectivity issue at home was what upset gamers, but the fact the game was no longer portable when travelling or moving around without some sort of wi-fi connectivity, which we all know is flakey at best when it comes to public wi-fi. Jay goes on to give a reason for no offline mode:
“You’ve got to make choices about what you want to do, and sometimes those choices are going to make some people unhappy, but if you feel like it’s what is the right thing to do to making a better product then you have to do it,”
Jay discusses the lack of an offline mode further in the news post.
the game’s not really being played right if it’s not online
You just…don’t get to tell me that. I play the game how I see fit. It’s like this with every gamer in every game. If they can’t play the game the way they want to, it’s a perceived flaw, and they may just end up not playing it. I’m not talking about “offline”, I’m talking about this S&M aspect of thorough control over what we do and do not want to do in games. Games like GTA are popular because you can play them however the hell you want.
Just who the **** does Wilson think he is saying that bull****?
Well Jay… **** you too -_-
Just because some games have are more ‘open ended’ than others, allowing for emergent gameplay options, does not, however, preclude the notion that there is a way the game was intended to be played. And he is say that, in the case of Diablo, they intend for it to be played online.
And, looking back on the series, it totally shows. Diablo pioneered the whole Battle.NET system to begin with. Diablo II had little to no offline support, with the offline mode lacking a lot of the newer gear and events like Pandemonium. Diablo II’s multiplayer continues to be updated while Blizzard acts like the offline mode doesn’t actually exist.
So, really, I’m not surprised or upset that they just straight up did online-only for Diablo III. I spent all of Diablo I & II playing password-protected online games so that I could experience the full range of what Blizzard was offering. And not just for the updated content, but also for the fact that the landscape continuously changed, enemies actually re-spawned, etc. Online was simply a superior experience on all fronts.
As for the portableness of the game, I’ve lived in several different states and even spent a healthy amount of time out of the country a few years back, and I never had a problem playing online in some form or another. Did I have to do corpse runs every once in a while? Yeah. Was the fun enough to negate any frustration from those corpse runs? Totally. The quality of the game made any hassle I went through worth it.
So, I can totally understand why people are frustrated by this decision, but overall I think it’s for the best. It allows for tighter security and control, and provides a better infrastructure for updates and additional content. It helps a fun game stay fun and expand.
thats a pretty cheesy argumentation – I would have played it online even if it came with offline sp . but there are apperantly a bunch of people who cant. so saying that it is all made in good intention and the “player experience”, is just bull****. not being able to play the game at all (becasue of online only) is better than playing it in singleplayer ?
it would have been no problem to implement a singleplayer button. and the neccesary server – client relation ship on a small scale. you could even build in a big “ATTENTION / disclaimer” -Window : which explicitly says that the offline experience is different from the online one – and that you can’t play offline character online.
but thats not their reason. they dont want the game to get pirated , and they dont want hackers to get an insight of their server client relation-ship.
and what does JW do ? he sugar coats all the real reason in a bunch of bullsh*t.
personally i can understand and comprehend the real reasons. with RMT in the game for virtual items Blizzard generates i would also do everything in my power to protect the integrity of this system. i dont support it , but i understand it.
what i dont understand is his “we live in the 21th century everyone has internet” and “playing alone offline is worse than playing it at all !” – bull****. seriously how dumb and naive he thinks we are ?
Nowhere did anyone ever say that playing offline was worse than playing at all. That’s just you putting words in their mouth. What they have said is that, in Diablo II, people who played offline missed out on all of the additional perks, content, and community that online provided. Since they’ve made it clear that they want people to experience the full range of online play, they are making it online only. Rather logical, no?
As for how simple it would be to implement, it wouldn’t be. Because of the way they have stated the game is set up, ie: client/server, it actually means that they would have to do a rather extensive rewrite in order to give an off-line mode. Due to the nature of client/server games, not all of the necessary data is stored on your computer when you play. This makes it easier for you to actually play the game, as it takes up less space on your rig and allows them to handle multiplayer so much easier than it would be otherwise. Client/Server also makes it a hell of a lot easier for them to patch, update, and expand the game, as I noted above.
And they are indeed making the game with good intentions towards player experience. If they weren’t, there’d be no point. A crappy game might sell well at first, but then people are going to stop buying it after they find out. An awesome game will continue selling well past its shelf life. Just look at Diablo II.
“Nowhere did anyone ever say that playing offline was worse than playing at all.”
but thats the premisse, how can you miss out on online play if you dont have internet available for what ever reason. JW gives no reason why there is no single player. the only thing he does is giving excuses as to why online play is superior. and so are you.
and tell me what ever you want but i dont think it can be so much harder to run the “server”-part on your machine. its just some basic operations. i mean i dont claim to know how it works . but i know that you can run wow server from a normal PC – and if you cant tell me explicitly why it is so much harder for them to rewrite parts as opposed to other games , keep it for yourself.
“And they are indeed making the game with good intentions towards player experience. If they weren’t, there’d be no point. A crappy game might sell well at first, but then people are going to stop buying it after they find out. An awesome game will continue selling well past its shelf life. Just look at Diablo II.”
you are going in circles. how could a singleplayer feature decrease the quality of the game ?
and no, in this case its no “good intention” – the only intention they are pursueing is keeping a ****-storm out of there door if it turns out they cannot guarantee security if they implement singleplayer – and the required components. thats like locking a kid in his room forever out of fear it could break a bone.
Again, it hasn’t been said that single player would decrease the quality of the game. In fact, they have stated the opposite, saying that they are balancing the game so that it can be soloed, and have stated that one of the play options will be single player, others being open game and by invite only game. I think what you’re actually trying to argue about is offline play, which I’ve already gone over, not single player modes.
Speaking of which, yes, you could run the server-side code from your end, essentially facilitating an off-line mode, which is how private WoW servers work, but it takes a bit more work than that. Running a server and playing off of the same computer is exhaustive on the machine. Even something as inexpensive (me-wise) to run as Minecraft recommends that you run your server on a separate machine, since playing on the same machine as the server often causes either your game or the server to lag, leading to a cascade of fail as they each try to catch up with the other one. And that’s Minecraft. Imagine how intensive Diablo III would be. As I said before, adding a feasible offline mode would require extensive re-writes to the code.
And if portability is your cause for concern over the lack of offline, there are a multitude of ways to have internet on the go. Lots of places have wifi hotspots spread throughout these days. Phone tethering is a fairly simple affair. Hotels, coffee shops, parks, buses, even airlines all have internet options in this day and age. If you really want it, you’ll find a way.
if you use words like extensive – give me a scope as far as i can tell you are just producing alot of steam . i mean diablo 2 could be run by our machines. and the data combatdata / positions / drop events arent all that different, so dont be so f*cking pretenious if you have no data to support your claims.
i mean i bet blizzard has “offline” versions of d3 for whatever they want to test.
and no. stable reliable internet is not everywhere, no matter how many “possibilities” you are able to come up with. and no matter how content you are with this solution. it wont change the internet situation of other people.
besides my main point is that jay wilson is talking alot of **** concerning that matter he doesnt say that they fear hacker – he comes up with that online experience nonsense you could completely ignore even if you actually played online.
and he still gave no real awnser as to why singleplayer fans are ignored – he just ignores it and goes on with his all happy fun fun fun online experience. as do you. completely sidestepping the issue hiding behind your extensive code rewriting, how extensive , what code ? more like PR nonsense.
Well here’s the thing, Diablo II was written from the outset to have an offline mode. Diablo III was not. By ‘extensive’, I mean that they’d have to write Enemy AI algorithms, Area generation Algorithms, drop rates, pretty much anything that is being handled on the Server side of the equation, over again. That may sound easy enough, just duplicate all the code, right? Except it’s not that simple. They’d have to rewrite the code within the Client-side architecture, instead of within the Server Side architecture. The Server-side code is ridiculously more complex because it has to know how to keep track of however many players while sending and receiving data and syncing across all of said players and more. The client side version of this wouldn’t need to be as complex. It could be infinitely simpler. But there’s a catch. With this separate code architecture in place for offline and online, they’d have to write each patch, each update, each expansion, twice. And at that point, there’s diminishing returns on investment and manpower and hours spent maintaining both version and whatnot to the point where they are invariably going to make the decision whether or not to keep updating both or just focus on one of them. Sound familiar? It should, because it’s the exact situation that Diablo II is in, where online has continued to be updated while the offline languishes somewhere several patches/years ago.
As for your theorized “offline test version”. It doesn’t exist. Ever heard of a virtual machine? Among several other uses it’s what’s used in the industry to simulate an internet connection between two computers on just one. That’s just one way to test online only games with limited resources, though you run into the problems I mentioned before of running a server and client on the same machine. For a company like Blizzard, I highly suspect they’ve already got actual servers up and running and are using them in-house to test. There’s simply no reason to write a different version of the game for testing purposes. In fact, there are several reasons not to, like the fact that if they were testing on an in-house offline version of the game, they’re not actually testing the online game they are going to release. It would be a waste of time and company resources.
And I apologize for not ‘backing up’ my ‘claims’. Firstly, they’re not claims, they are reasoned out suppositions and facts based on interviews given by Blizzard and the fact that I’ve been working as a programmer in this industry for going on five years now. Admittedly, most of the networking explanations I’ve given have come from my wife, but since she’s a networking programmer in the game industry, I’m willing to bet she knows what she’s talking about.
I’m sorry if I sounded pretentious at any time during my explanations, it was not my intent.
Eh, not totally true Risingred. I agree with the sentiment but developers make a game how they see fit. It is you as a consumer that chooses whether or not to support it.
Jay is a T-Total idiot. Seriously. He doesn’t have a clue why hardcore players play the game (he continually claims it is for bragging rights, he thinks playing online is the “best experience”—yeah, playing with hackers, dupers, griefers, and idiots who are more likely to get you killed than benefit the party is really quite the good experience, eh? Not to mention lag.
As a single player you have to actually know how to play the game and develop a character and you can’t leech off others. Of course they dumbed down Diablo because they don’t want to cater to people who actually know how to play without the best gear, perfect torches, perfect anni=s and duped charms.
I had to register just to comment against Grumpy Old Wizard. You seem to be thinking from a very selfish perspective in regards to how you play the game. It’s obvious you don’t have friends, or you wouldn’t be saying the things you are about online play. Get some. Diablo is and always has been an online game. Look at the post above yours by Zagreus, he’s 100% right.
Good job, fanboy. Go for the ad hominem. Classy argument.
Where’s my downvote option, please?
Ironic post there. I’m fairly certain you don’t understand the concept of Ad Hominem
100% of my time playing Diablo 2 was playing solo or local network.
Then you were doing it wrong, to be honest.
wow thats boring.
@Dalren
Totally true… if you’re not doing 20 baal runs in 10 minutes you’re not playing Diablo 2 right…
I need to stop reading his interviews; I’m really starting to hate that man.
Considering he is the one making the game, it’s HIS game and he IS the one that gets to say how it get’s played. If you were making it, then it would be your call whether the best way to play it was online or offline, but it’s not. They’re obviously designing it for online play. Whether or not you think that’s the best choice is completely apart from the fact that it isn’t YOUR choice at all.
Fine enough that he’s making the game and he gets to say what kind of game it should be. NOT fine that he’s telling us we’re all too stupidto play it any other way, or we’re flat out wrong if we want to play the game any other way, or we’re all living in the dark age, or we need to do some frigging home improvements just to be able to play his game.
Well obviously D3 is the end product of the labors of hundreds of people, and no one person can claim credit for any single feature, much less the whole project. That said, do you really think Jay Wilson was the point man on denying offline play in D3? Rather than say, the anti-hacking guys, the bean counters, Bobby Kotick’s valet, etc?
If Blizzard had decided that making D3 online-only would cost them too many sales and profits, it would still contain a non-B.net play option/ What do you think Jay Wilson would be doing in these interviews in that case? Complaining about the lack of an online-only requirement? Of course not. He’d be talking up their commitment to satisfying their customers, to allowing D3 to be played in as many ways as possible, in denying that hacking would be any worse because of it, etc.
As the lead media interaction person for D3, positively talking up features in D3 is as important a part of his job as game design itself. Perhaps more so.
fair point.
However I feel As the lead media interaction person for D3 he should choose he words more carefully.
In his statement
they basically unintentionally opt out of all the cooperative experience, all the trading experience, and the core of Diablo is a circle-trading game. So for us we’ve always viewed it as an online game – the game’s not really being played right if it’s not online
he states Diablo, referring to the whole genre including Diablo II, and not just Diable III or D3.
This implies that those playing single player in Diablo II were playing it wrong, which is a very antagonistic statement to make to say the least!
To make such remarks as
Erm… upgrade the wiring in his house
and
sometimes those choices are going to make some people unhappy
are in my opinion excessively flippant, especially when a cursory glance at the forms pages in incgames itself show the following stats
Name Viewing Treads Posts
Statistics 36 9,532 87,316
PvP 8 4,870 87,303
Amazon 40 8,855 90,059
Assassin 26 7,543 73,261
Barbarian 40 10,670 109,823
Druid 21 9,326 136,784
Necromancer 34 10,140 128,322
Paladin 55 15,555 161,902
Sorceress 79 11,933 113,628
Hardcore 12 10,513 190,668
Single Player 146 31,021 764,726
And under the trading forums only 2 forms have more posts than single player
Europe Standard – Ladder 63 126,858 1,154,067
US East Standard – Ladder 38 120,332 844,186
Which in my opinion point a a significant active fan-base effected.
Granted there will be a migration of fans from WOW over to Diablo III when it comes out.
But as stated I feel he did not handle the issue using the most appropriate language.
Of COURSE it’s MY Choice! It’s my choice not to play “HIS” game! Why would I want to play a game produced by a bullying kid? There is only one “correct” way of playing the game, so why bother allowing anything else? You’re right, he thinks it’s “HIS” game. The joke of it is, though, he PAID to make this game. It only exists, HE only exists, if I PAY to play it. But I don’t want to play “HIS” game. I want to play MY game, MY way, and if I can’t get that here, why would I support it financially? You vote with your wallet. Do you really want to vote for the concept of the all mighty developers know so much more than the GD players that we just suck it up and accept whatever they give us? That’s it’s THEIR game and if you don’t like it, too damn bad, it’s not about you anyway? That we need to be coddled and led like eFFing sheep because we obviously don’t know what’s best for us, and can’t play the game right without them limiting our options? If you do, I pity you the future you’re trying to build should it come to pass….
By the way… did no one else notice the message at the heart of his statement? That “The core of Diablo is a circle trading game”? That because players DEFAULT (meaning, PREFER) to “unintentionally” opting out of the trading experience, “why are we allowing that”? He’s saying RMAH is the core of the game, and they have no intention of letting you opt out (except apparently in HC… total contradiction to the rest of their stance…). Essentially, we’re not just sheep to be led, we’re cash cows to be milked for all we’re worth. Because, they figure that enough people will suck it up, and they’ll be able to milk so much money out of them, that it will more than make up for the people who choose not to play the game because of this. That not allowing you to opt out will work, because we’re too stupid or powerless to do anything other than accept what they give us. Damn. Guess it’s time to boycott Blizzard products…
Being online whining about not being able to play online. /facepalm -_-’
This feature has 0.00% affect on how I play the game, and all the people I know think likewise.
Edit: It’s not even an e-sports game like Starcraft2 where Lan suppoort would benefit the lagless e-sport tournament games.
If my complaint were my inability to maintain an internet connection, or if typing in a forum was as lag sensitive as playing an online game, you’d have a valid facepalm. As is, you only have a reading comprehension failure, making you seem obtuse. Just because someone CAN get online any time they want doesn’t mean they have to support a requirement to be online and connected to external servers to play a game that does not benefit from that set up. By the way, I can’t complain about playing a computer game, either, because I have a computer, right? All computers are made the same, and any complaint about the game must be about the requirement of owning a computer, which I’ve obviously already met. Try, instead of just reading, to actually comprehend what someone is saying. It might benefit you in life.
Bill Roper used to be the one to get it in the neck from fans. It’s an unenviable job being the main spokesperson for a game and you need to have a thick skin.
A lot of what he’s had to tell us over the last few weeks has been terribly divisive but their decisions won’t change (not until Diablo 3 is out at least and even then not fundamentally) and I don’t see this stopping any of the community buying the game. I reckon any anger will wash away at that point.
Oh… It’ll stop me for one… Hanging on a lousy UMTS-connection with an average ping of 700ms, because nothing else is available in the flat I live in (unless paying 16k for installations – good luck with 270 bucks a month). There’s just no point in spending the money for a game, you won’t be able to play.
Edit: Not to mention that Diablo WAS a game of choice. Now what their doing is taking the choice of how to play the game from me. (Selffound HC on D2 makes most fun, imho)
“There’s just no point in spending the money for a game, you won’t be able to play.”
I agree 100%. This statement can also be made, based on that logic.
There is no point spending time bitching on a fan sight for a game that you can’t play.
Beeing a fan of the series forces me to “bitch” (your word) against the changes to it’s predecessor because my heart is in it, too. And one cannot simply stand by if something one loves is torn apart.
Well, if Blizzard wants to force players to be social, why aren’t they making Diablo III a Facebook game? That would let them enforce the “cooperative experience” they seem to believe is an essential part of the game. What about those of us who INTENTIONALLY avoid that side of things?
That has to be one of the most pig-headed, elitist, anti-gamer comments I have ever seen. Gamers will gravitate to a modality that they enjoy. Denying a particular mode will only serve to alienate a particular section of their potential market-base. Oh well, I suppose they have more money than they can legitimately figure out what to do with, given the success of WoW, so now they feel it’s their place to try to change the landscape to what THEY like, as opposed to what others might like.
Good luck with that. You’ll likely do quite well. I, for one, hope you end up losing a lot of your users as a result.
why don’t they get to tell you how to play their game? I’m sorry I believe blizzard is making a video game. A action role playing game. All games pretty much have you play it the way they want you to.
When it comes to questions about the reasons behind the online-only decision they should really stick to security. At least that’s a defensible position.
I agree HardRock. Now I’m not one of the small segment of the population that has crappy/no access to a net connection. My home connection is pretty good and hence have no real issue with needing to be online to play, but I can see the problem for others who play when travelling, have no connection, etc.. However I’d say for those of you who are in that segment or just don’t like the idea of being online to play, then talk how talking will hurt them. Don’t buy the game. If more people choose not to buy it and the game doesn’t do so hot then maybe they’ll listen. The same thing has happened with WoW. They made the game easy and got more players. They listen to the cheque books, not forum complaints that only seem to get a little of the population.
Yep. In order to protect the full online experience from the worst of the worst hacks and cheats, you need to restrict how much of the game somebody can get their fingers in on their own hard drive. Stop telling us how we like to play, and at least pay lip service to the fact that you’re protecting people from the evil hackers/dupers/cheaters. I think you’ll get a lot more of the press on board if you show them how easy it is to hack an offline only game.
They would if that were remotely true. But in fact, they don’t give a rat’s ass about that stuff. Didn’t you hear them? What’s the worst a hack will do? Make you more powerful than you should be. But, it’s not a competitive environment. It’s cooperative. You should be happy if your team mate is more powerful than he should be, you get more done faster, and it’s actually better for everyone, per Blizzard.
What’s the worst a duper can do? Make items available to people that shouldn’t be available without endless blood sweat and tears? Well, we have RMAH to solve that problem for us.
What’s the worst a cheater can do? In the words of Blizzard, since this is a coop game, who is he going to cheat, diablo? According to Blizzard, you modifying your power level through mechanics exterior to the gameplay itself is not an issue, as it “doesn’t really hurt anyone”. They don’t talk about those things, because they don’t care about those things. The only reason security becomes important is that, if people can hack, dupe, or cheat, they don’t need RMAH. The only reason to worry about security at all, is not to improve the gameplay experience (which is no more impacted by those things than it is RMAH), but to protect their revenue streams. Trouble with pitching that angle to the press, then, is that they might notice the hypocrisy, and that might attract more negative attention to RMAH, which Blizzard wants to avoid at all costs.
Except you completely ignore the fact that as soon as hacks and dupes are possible, the economy becomes flooded with high end items that are intended to be very rare. That sort of hack doesn’t just hurt that one player’s experience, it destroys the entire game economy which ruins the game for everyone on the realm. The RMAH is still reliant on items entering the economy and as long as items remain rare, there is a balance of power against the RNG and number of players which itself can’t ruin the economy the way duped items would.
What is the difference, if you would, between the play experience being “ruined” for the one person out of 50,000 who ponies up the appropriate cash for the equivalent of an Enigma, or it being “ruined” for 25,000 people who get such an item, from an INDIVIDUAL level? Essentially, what are you actually saying? That obtaining the highest end gear in the game destroys the game experience for the individual who obtains it? It had better not. Or that doing so for a low cost ruins it? This is the sort of logical fallacy I’m talking about. If getting high end items ruins the game, and the only barrier is the rarity (which directly translates to cost), that’s a terrible system. If they do not, it DOESN’T MATTER if 1 person out of 1,000 or 1 out of 2 have those items, from a GAME EXPERIENCE standpoint. The only people who benefit from the forced rarity are those who obtain those items and wish to SELL them. The people who benefit from this are item sellers and Blizzard, and this economy you talk about, NOT the players of the game.
The ones who benefit are the ones who cheat. If I find an awesome item that many players want it loses a lot of value if everyone cheater and his dog has duped it 100 times over and now I don’t get anything for it. Think about the SoJ. Imagine if you legitimately found one. Wouldn’t you feel upset that it is worth 1/20 of another good unique when you realize that it would be worth 100 times as much had it not been duped to oblivion? Now you have something that should be worth a lot due to the item quality and rarity that turns out to be almost worthless. That doesn’t make for a fun experience.
“I don’t think the connectivity issue at home was what upset gamers, but the fact the game was no longer portable when travelling or moving around without some sort of wi-fi connectivity, which we all know is flakey at best when it comes to public wi-fi.”
Is there a poll somewhere which tries to figure out how many people play games on the run? I for one couldn’t stand doing simple word processing on a laptop in the subway. But maybe there are pro players out there who prefer to fire railguns with pinpoint precision using a trackpad on a moving bus, hack and slash LE enchanted champions on a 7″ touchscreen at midnight on a campsite, etc. In other words, how many people play games like D3 on portable devices with unreliable connections? How frequently do they do it compared to playing on a desktop with a reliable connection? Do they prefer the laptop or the desktop for gaming?
People being this upset that they can’t play Diablo III on the go is simply absurd. How about you consider your trips to the outdoor world as a vacation from what will likely be non-stop Diablo III marathons? I worry more for people’s addiction to computers/internet more than I worry about this great “injustice” Blizzard and Jay Wilson have apparently inflicted upon us.
Yea the whole connectivity thing really hurt them for World of Warcraft…. Sure its a MMO, but Diablo 3 is turning more and more into one. And frankly I prefer the added security of an online only game.
Basically they understand why some people are upset, but in reality most gamers have internet connections. Not only that, but many have connections while on the run. 3g and 4g cards are widely available and you can tether to your phone (android users just root and tether for free). The people I feel bad for are our troops over seas who have poor to no connection. I feel something should be done for them. Other than that, I don’t feel that anything he has said is really out of line. internet connection in your hose is bad? Take this time before the game comes out to fix it. Can’t afford an internet connection? Maybe you should be working instead of playing then lol.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
Ben Franklin. I don’t think people realize WHY people are upset. For me, it’s not about availability of an internet connection. It’s a much more basic concept than that. I personally would NEVER give up freedom in exchange for some “added security”. And by the way, added security from WHAT? Who is the big bad man you are scared of, and what could he do to you if it wasn’t online only? In fact, have you thought of how much more can be done to you now that you are forced to share a network connection and rely on external servers for your data protection? You have an open port the entire time the game is being played. And you somehow think this is more secure? Stop being a sheep, and think for a minute. What do YOU, Personally, actually gain from this? A secure shopping forum for D2 items? What else?
Sorry, but how does D3 in any way actually relate to liberty or safety? Owning and playing D3 offline is not a human right. Blizzard is in no way required to make D3 available offline. They did not even have to make a sequel to D2 at all. I can understand being upset but this argument of yours is really trying to stretch it…
“And frankly I prefer the added security of an online only game”. Did you miss that statement? It directly relates. And how does the concept of accepting a tradeoff of freedom (to play where, when, and how you want) for “security” (the PERSONAL benefits of which no one seems able to describe) NOT apply to this situation? And how can you take his quote to describe only human rights? Of COURSE they are not required to make anything they don’t want. What I don’t get is how happy people are about the loss of their freedom of gameplay experience, in exchange for protection from botters, hackers, and dupers, though no one seems to be able to describe how they negatively impact them in a way the RMAH won’t do itself.
Whether you prefer freedom or not doesn’t lend any to an argument for Blizzard’s choice to make the game online only.
The loss of freedom to play game anywhere is a cost necessary for a secure online experience. It isn’t possible to make a secure game while retaining the freedom of offline play; whereas essential liberty is possible with long term safety making this a very different situation from the one in which the quote originated which is why I thought it be quite silly and not a significant point to make in an argument.
Yes. Ben Franklin must be spinning in his grave over this.
You are short-sighted, TheDestructor. Sometimes people just want to unwind after a day of vacationing. How people spend their time is none of your concern, you apologist.
the core of Diablo is a circle-trading game. So for us we’ve always viewed it as an online game – the game’s not really being played right if it’s not online
I completely agree with the above commentors. Is he just completely ignoring the SP community? The SP experience is BETTER offline, no two ways about it. No lag, no hassle with the internet, no need for a high bandwidth plan, easy to show friends my character, /players 8, item muling, no-one trying to pvp or stupid people joining the game, the entirety of my item database I know is completely legit. I do like the auction trading house enough to make the change (poor students need money) but for Jay to say that suggests he doesn’t really understand diablo. How ignorant.
are you saying diablo 2 was a “high bandwith plan” game online? have you heard of password protected games?
I’ve jumped back into some online D2 play the last few days. Gah! I totally realize (again) why people want to play offline. I can’t go more than an hour without everything coming to a halt, with my character running around hitting things that just sit there, until the server FINALLY catches up and I find myself dead on the floor. This is on a 50 mbps connection. I can’t imagine trying to play hardcore like this.
True, but they’ve probably got about 3 sick hamsters running the D2 B.net servers at this point. One hopes they’ll be devoting more resources to keeping D3 properly playable.
One hopes. And they probably will for the first year. But since D2 takes much less effort to keep at a playable level, and is in its current condition even as they approach release for a sequel (meaning they should ideally be having it running great, so people think how much they want the new product), what kind of guarantee, whatsoever, is there that support will exist in any form in 5-10 years, much less the support needed to keep it playable? And since you won’t have any options to play offline, what sort of fees will be attached to this ‘support’?
Connection Speed/bandwidth (data transfer rate) has nothing to do with delays, that due to your ping (time taken for the info to be sent)
This was always my experience. Almost all my online hardcore characters were killed by network issues. The monsters would stop moving, then the client would disconnect. I knew that when I got back online my char would be dead.
When your character dies from poor play, that’s part of the game and part of the fun. When packet loss becomes character loss, it’s really upsetting.
Here in Australia I’m 200ms and 14+ hops from US West. Timeouts are a standard part of online play in D2. I had to stop playing online HC for that reason, and might not be able to play HC D3 at all.
That’s a damn shame, because I personally love HC and much prefer to play online. The only solution may be “home-brew hardcore”, where you simply enforce the hardcore rule on yourself. I used to play Diablo 1 like that, way back in the day.
He must forget that America is still living in the stone ages as far as internet connectivity goes. This is not Japan nor Korea. A lot of people still have issues with connectivity, even though they are paying for it.
I’ve lived in NY, LA, and Vermont. All three of those places had perfectly fine internet connections.
Don’t know where you live but there has to be a decent DSL or Cable internet provider around.
There “has to”? Is it a law? If you’re in an apartment complex (more and more US citizens all the time) who only have agreements with a single cable provider, and who don’t allow external mountings (no satellite), and are therefore sharing your connection to node with 400+ apartments (and probably therefore 1000+ devices) with no other options whatsoever for high speed internet, do you think your internet connectivity will rate as “perfectly fine”? Or even “Decent”? Way to think outside your own life situation.
You dont want satellite internet for gaming as the ping times are horrible as your data got to go via the satellite.
I’ve lived in North and South Carolina, Upper and Lower California, Virginia, Florida, Iowa, Illinois, and Washington State. Never had internet problems, even when living in the middle of bumf*ck nowhere, Iowa. Heck, the internet connection was crappier when I lived in Japan. Other than the pain of sometimes having to connect via dialup depending on where I lived, the only time I’ve had internet connection problems in the last 20 years aside from power outages or the computer dying.
Notice how we got down voted for no real reason at all?
There are a number of highly controversial statements in this quote.
1. ”in this day and age the notion that there’s this a whole vast majority of players out there that don’t have online connectivity – this doesn’t really fly any more.”
Ok, it may be true that more people have access to the internet than ever before, but I thought the real issues were not having access to the internet at all times, having access to a poor internet connection or not being able to avoid lag etc from even a good connection (esp when playing HC) like the type players currently experience from time to time playing SC2. Also worth noting that if it’s like SC2, then playing co-op with someone that has a slow connection can also slow down your game.
2. “Players default immediately to [offline single player]. So, they basically unintentionally opt out of all the cooperative experience, all the trading experience”.
I remember reading the high percentage of players that never played online D2, but I think it’s a leap to read “intent” into that. To say that players were making an “unintentional” act by choosing offline single player is kind of insulting. Players didn’t understand the difference? I just don’t buy that. Also, if that’s the reason, then you can easily remedy the situation by explaining the difference to the player. WoW has 3 different types of servers that you have to choose from that each come with a brief description of the experience. Explain it to us better then if you’re worried, but leave us the choice (if this really was a big concern).
Final thought on this… if Diablo is a co-op game and they don’t want us to “unintentionally” opt out of that experience, then why balance D3 to be soloable?
3. “The core of Diablo is a circle-trading game.”
I did a double take on this one. I thought we were told all along by Wilson and others that the core of Diablo was awesomeness, epicness and items. Not that we need to be told this. If you were going to explain Diablo to somone unfamiliar with the game, would the word “trading” ever enter the discussion? Killing lots of things fast to bust pinatas filled with phat lootz. Period. Trading and the item market in D2 was a byproduct of this, but to say it’s the “core”?
4. “The game’s not really being played right if it’s not online.”
Risingred already summed up my thoughts on this one. It’s dangerous as a designer to get into “right” and “wrong” ways to play a game.
Finally,
“You’ve got to make choices about what you want to do, and sometimes those choices are going to make some people unhappy, but if you feel like it’s what is the right thing to do to making a better product then you have to do it”
That’s a fair statement, why he didn’t just say this instead of these other comments, I don’t know. Maybe he was tired.
I know I haven’t been making games professionally for very long, but the notion that the designer doesn’t know the ‘right’ way to play his own game still pisses me off. If we didn’t assume there was a ‘right’ way to play, the game would never get made, because its concept would be too nebulous to ever start implementing. There has to be a ‘right’ way, an intended way, in order for the game to have a solid enough design to proceed and be made from. What the players do with it after it gets into their hands is up to them.
That’s the trouble. We all can agree there is an intended way of playing, an idea the developers have of how people will play. The issue is in your last sentence. The statements being made recently indicate their intent is that it will NOT be up to the players what to do with it once it’s in their hands. That they will be prevented from playing it in the “wrong” way, because it’s all about the experience the developers want to give them, not the experience they want to have. That’s the issue, right there. We’re not begrudging him his “intended gameplay”, just the exclusion of the possibility of anything else.
Why does it piss you off?
1. The genre has already been established, “ARPG”. if Jay or any designer made a new genre of game, then he would obviously design it the way he wanted it to be played. If you want a game to be played MMO style, then don’t make a non-MMO game.
2. The Diablo franchise has already been established. You don’t make a part 3 and say, well you play this game differently than other games. Kickback has it right… the point of all GAMES is to have fun. How each of us has that fun is up to the player: some want pvp, some want item hunting etc.
so yes, there IS a right way to play the game – it’s how every Diablo player has been playing Diablo since it was made. You level up, kill monsters, watch the story unfold.
Being the director of anything that has already been established comes with responsibilities. See example: Avatar, the last airbender movie. Yuck.
Jay is battle fatigued! Pull him out! Pull him out! Poor thing, he just can’t cut a break.
This is the trouble when you apply a thin veneer over your true motivations for doing something. It tends to crumble very easily and you risk losing a little respect. They should have just been up front and said they wanted everyone to play in their environment (b.net), buy into (figuratively speaking) their social network and be able to take advantage of their virtual shopping features (in and out of game). I believe more people would have appreciated the honesty. They should have known trotting out ‘security’ as a reasoning wouldn’t cut it. They were ill-advised.
NadZul - I have played on my lap top but I have a wee mouse I take with me. I can only just hold it together using a trackpad when surfing, I’d probably go into a seizure if I tried to game with one.
“Jay is battle fatigued! Pull him out! Pull him out!”
I laughed at this… probably true.
But security is a very valid reason to cut out offline mode. Security is a better excuse than “some idiot didn’t know what he was clicking when he made his first character.”
But my offline characters can’t get onto b.net so never the twain shall meet.
And I totally agree on people mistakenly creating offline chars when they thought they could take them onto b.net. We must be talking single digits when it comes to people who did that.
Your offline characters have access to all of the algorithms for loot generation, map generation, monster AI, and other critical game components. That right there is a huge, monster security risk for the online component. If you don’t have that stuff (b/c there is no offline component whatsoever), then it becomes much, much more difficult to get working hacks running on B.net.
“…then it simply takes more time to get working hacks running on B.net.”
/fixed
Fair enough on the laptop setup you mention, Elly. How frequently do you game on that compared to better equipped desktops?
“… take advantage of their virtual shopping features…”
Agreed, that’s a much more honest reason. Every company likes to see sustained profit, and this is a handy way to do it in D3. In fact, I figure it’s also part of the rationale for allowing HC deaths -> SC transfer. You’ll get a player who now has a SC toon that can engage with the RMAH. Either they really discount SC as a “worthy” mode and sells off all their gear immediately, or they find the pain of death more bearable and continue to play the game in SC instead of giving up. They also get to keep their gear should they want to sell it later on. Furthermore, it nullifies the “ugh, I found this highly valuable item on HC, but there’s no RMAH” argument in 2 steps: 1) transfer to lvl 1 HC suicide mule 2) profit.
@ NadZul “Fair enough on the laptop setup you mention, Elly. How frequently do you game on that compared to better equipped desktops?”
Few times a month. I won’t be playing D3 on that though. I’ll play on my desktop which is wired.
Finally someone figured it out. There’s only so many times one person can get badgered with the same questions over and over again. Not to mention the fact that there’s a bit of hostility in the questioning they have been receiving.
Another month of this and I think Jay will just start saying “f..k off, it’s our game we’ll make it work however we want.”
I’m going to miss the LAN play of D2, but come on. It is what it is, give them a break. If you REALLY don’t like it then don’t buy the game and stop obsessing on fan sites.
But one fewer person buying their game barely matters. If that one person can convince 10 or 100 others that maybe this isn’t something they want to support, it becomes much more likely Blizzard will actually take notice, and that perhaps positive change can take place. We’re not bitching to bitch, we’re bitching because we want things to change, and the only way that will happen is if people actually care. Meaning, victory must be obtained in the court of public opinion, which can most easily happen where? The fan sites. Who is the bigger fan? The one who, upon realizing things have gone south, tries to do something about it? Or the fan who only wants to hear viewpoints that agree with him, and accepts any turn, no matter how negative, as “it is what it is” (therefore implying a lack of regard for the quality of the game or the integrity of the company behind it)?
Exactly, I feel this is a great opportunity for me to actually take a break when i’m on the go and not being able to play, people that complain about not being online much? A very very minute percentage of those people will actually be bothered about this issue after release and that minute percentage of sales loss if they even do lose many sales from it won’t even phase blizzard.
Plus it makes sense, security, patches, better play experience it has all been say a thousand times before. Plus in this day and age most people have internet at home and can therefore play at least a few hours a day even if they are busy with family and work like myself. Sometimes i will have to travel and not be able to play, such is life.
It makes sense? Explain EXACTLY how the better security improves YOUR play experience. If you like, I can explain how the better security offered by not having an active network connection and playing a game solely on my own machine improves mine. Patches? One of the most fun things in D2 was running 1.07 characters, or other “time travellers”. The patches changed a TON, and often times in ways that many though was for the worse. How is being FORCED to play with the latest patch an improvement? Better play experience? In what way, with DETAILS, please? It has all been said 1000 times, like doing so makes it true. But they’re just words. They’re fabricated excuses for a system that offers much less personal security (even as it offers Blizzard more security), and delivers an inferior play experience for anyone who wasn’t already playing online, for whom this has no positive impact anyway. The only one who wins from this is Blizzard. No one else. People keep trying to justify it, but without any actual facts or reasons, just more meaningless unsupported statements treated like facts.
You make some silly claims here but I just wanted to address this one in particular: “ Explain EXACTLY how the better security improves YOUR play experience.”
This one is quite obvious, better security reduces hacks, bots, and dupes which stabilizes the economy which provides me a better environment to trade in. Dupes drastically devalue the items I find making it more difficult to get the items I want from my lucky finds. To me, this alone makes online only worth it since playing offline was so terribly boring.
It provides a better environment to trade in? That’s your benefit? So it’s not about the game, it’s about the trading? Blimey, you really have bought into Blizzard’s concept of Diablo as a forum to support the RMAH. You do realize, you don’t get any benefit from this improved trading experience unless you’re an item seller, right? Dupes drive down the cost of high end items, making them more accessible to the general populace. It makes it easier to get the items you want, just harder to sell the items you want to sell. Blizzard and item sellers win out, sure, but as I am neither one of those, it doesn’t benefit me. But as you’re approaching this from an item seller standpoint, it makes sense to limit the choices and freedoms of everyone else, to make them more likely to buy your items. Is that really what D3 is going to be? A community of item sellers? Maybe I should be glad I’m not going to be taking part.
Half of the game is about trading and I’m not talking about the RMAH. That is a sad attempt at diverting the point.
Anyone who did any trading is an item seller at some point. Again I am not talking about RMT either. If I find a SoJ and want a GF I can’t get one in D2 since the SoJ was so massively duped an UnIDed GF went for 30-40 SoJ.
This is just the beginning, I don’t think you fully grasp the economic impact of cheaters. If you did you would understand that duping is essentially counterfeiting and you would understand why counterfeiting is illegal.
Hes really got to stop arguing the point around who wants to do what and when , just stick to the concept of server to client security being the reason why there is no server architecture on the disk and therefore no offline play.