There is No Pausing in Diablo!
Posted 23 February 2012 by FluxActually, there is now. In one of the many undocumented features added in 
Beta Patch 13, a pause feature was implemented into Diablo III. It only functions when you are playing solo, and it kicks in automatically any time you hit the Escape key (which you have to do during every new play session, since the D3 beta continues to drink from a brimming cup of Lethe and thus can not remember that you turned on monster hit bars, the Elective Mode, etc, last time).
If anyone dislikes this feature, I have yet to see their complaints in the forums, though I’m sure some will appear, like malevolent genies from angry bottles, in response to this post. It’s not an exploit, unless you consider pausing the action to be cheating. You still get the same (unpaused) ten second delay (if you’re not in town) before you leave the game; the timer just starts running once you select exit and the options menus close.
I bring this up now since I was using our Battle.net category tag to search for past posts about the Chat Channels, and tripped over this news item from last October, in which one of the B.net EU CMs replied to a query about a pause button with the following words:
As always in the lengthy development process of a Blizzard title, yesterday’s “no way” may become today’s shiny new feature. (And tomorrow’s de-iterated memory?)
While reading that news post from the ancient history of late 2011, I skimmed the comments and was surprised at how many of the 100+ replies were from players strongly advocating against the inclusion of a pause button in Diablo 3. I’m not going to quote a bunch since you can read them if you’re interested, but here are my two favorite from the first page.
In fairness, if I genuinely think my child had a serious accident, pausing a video game would be the last thing on my mind. –Starrise
In fairness, if I’m playing Diablo Hardcore, my child’s serious accident would be the last thing on my mind. –Darthnixa
So, now that there is (unexpectedly) a pause button, what do you guys think? It only works in solo games, it’s not (obviously) exploitable, and thus it seems a convenience without any big drawbacks. Do some of you still think it’s a bad thing and not properly in the hardcore (as well as Hardcore) mode of Diablo gameplay? Do any of you voting that way have clumsy children?
Pausing online when playing alone will promote singleplayer, great. .. .. .
I don’t think it promotes singleplayer, but rather protects the interest of the single player. Besides, you can’t farm gold like a beast when your stinking game is paused! Bwahaha! Multiplayer for teh win!
Only good can come out of this, especially in hardcore.
Why? You can’t do anything while it’s paused, and you can’t leave the game without dying because there’s a 10 second window until your character goes offline, even if you quit the game.
I like the Pause possibility, although I don’t need it – once the game’s out, I am never going to stop playing.
When Jehovah’s Witnesses come knocking at your door when you’re killing demons, you can safely pause and go tell them to bugger off.
We are actually doing their dirty work, no?
I have two kids, if I need to get up and get something or do something for them, (though it usually isn’t urgent for me to rush out of the room) I don’t want to portal to town and then have to walk back to where I was just to make sure a mob I didn’t see won’t wander over and smack me around as I stand idle. Pausing would completely fix this issue, I don’t understand why it wasn’t there to begin with.
I like that they’re going to include the ability to Pause. Now since I don’t plan on getting it on release day just yet (I really don’t want to suffer at the potential chance of latency affecting my gameplay no matter how small that chance is…even if many have said that I won’t notice it while others cry about it during beta – yeah yeah I know it’s beta and blah blah blah)…it just says to me that they are listening to some of the requests (since I’d probably only ever play single player anyway – I really don’t think anyone would want me to play with me if I affected their latency or they’d just move on without me anyway)…and it’s with a change like this that I still have hope for a strictly offline mode someday (even if I have to authenticate via battle.net each time I play).
I’m pretty neutral, I do have kids, and most of my play time will be after they are in bed. With the youngest being just over a year old, if she wakes up I will have to go get her. But, taking a couple seconds to port back to town doesn’t really bother me, and since most of my game play will end up being with friends it is likely that is what I will have to do anyway. Though on the rare occasion that I do play solo I will probably take advantage of the pause since its there…
That’s the point. All these people “if my child had [x] then I wouldn’t care about pausing!” don’t have kids. If they did, they’d realise that pressing esc before moving to see what has happened takes no time at all and makes no difference.
Considering most of the time they’d just want a glass of water / ten more minutes with their light on / another excuse to stay up late.
Sign of console!
A future console version was confirmed long ago, so you don’t have to look for “signs” of one. Not to mention a pause feature is hardly exclusive to consoles…
How does this work if one of your friends joins your game? Or do you have to invite them in private games?
You can only pause in private (single player) games. Pause doesn’t work in invite or public games.
I really like it. I automatically pressed escape if I left the screen anyways, now it actually does something.
I don’t think it will promote solo playing all that much. There are much, much better incentives in grouping up. Faster kills means more loot, more loot means more power, more power means more fun.
One concern though… If you are about to die, press escape. Now, exiting the game normally would probably give you the timer and unpause the game. But what happens if you alt-f4?
Same thing as you ALT+F4 without pressing ESC before it. Server will check if you wont die until timer ends countig.
Not like you’ll play through hardcore and keep pressing space very 10 seconds to make sure no monsters get the jump on you.
There are a whole bunch of funny topics online at the amazon.co.uk/.com forums (diablo 3 and C.E. sections) with people whining and openly hating the game and Blizzard for being online only, the RMAH and no pauzing and such.
Tried to convince them a while back that online only is needed to stop the bloody maphack and all that stuff and the rest is either being changed, updated, no big deal or can be worked around or such.
Still no big fan of the RMAH myself though.
Ehm yea.
Again and again, don’t talk about stuff you have no clue about. Maphacks are as possible as they were before. When your client (your computer) connects, it is sent a seed from the server which tells the client how to construct the level. At this moment and afterwards it’s always possible to maphack as the contents is in memory.
They will do all they can to detect these hacks, but that’s no different than before.
I don’t believe that because when I lag out and disconnect from the server I can easily reach the edge of the map. If it really was seed based generation then why would it not know what to generate when disconnected from the server?
People use maphacks in Starcraft 2′s multiplayer, obviously map hacks can be used online. Hell there was a hack for a short time that you could warp in Immortals from warp gates. The difference is Blizzard can perma-ban these people much much easier.
I think the real “fix” in terms of hacking will probably be preventing item duplication, which is a HUGE problem in Diablo 2, to the point of breaking the economy completely. Though we won’t necessarily know because nobody knows how they structured such a system.
Hunh, I made front page, but not quite the way I expected. I was feeling snarky that day.
Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a great addition to the game, and I’m glad they put it in for those that desired it.
Too late now, off with your head!
No love for the converts?
Also, why do I have to watch a video to solve the captcha now? That’s terrible…it can’t be just me…
Just hit the “new puzzle” button at the bottom left until it gets to one that isn’t a video.
It’s probably (and hopefully) only for SP.