BNet stability and DIII - a question of lag?

[lukefojut]

Does anyone else have any thoughts on what upgrades will be necessary to the Blizzard servers as and when Diablo III is released? As we all know, playing DII in the new(ish) ladder environment can be very frustrating, with the steady stream of c/i messages! Do you think that there will be significant investment in new server capabilities, or will they just prune back the support available for older titles (for example, will there only be a few servers for DII in three years time?)

I suppose much of this can be answered when we see the multiplayer offering explained. I'm hoping that gaming will also be through BNet as opposed to a seperate, pay-to-play model. While the new game (as it currently appears) isn't too much of a departure from the previous incarnation, it looks significantly 'prettier' and bandwidth will need to be considered!

As of yet I suppose it's too early to try and second guess the development teams' intentions for multiplayer, but it's an interesting one to consider...

Also, as a supplementary thought, no comment was made on map editors/mod support for the new game. Is it possible that the purist game where hacks and exploits are made next to impossible to implement may be around the corner? The new and improved graphics might also have the affect of making things trickier for the scallywags who code the more popular hacks, as from what I have read on the subject, many of them work by altering the DII graphics in some shape or form. This would lead to more server power being used for people who actually wanted to play the game and significantly less power being wasted by those who wanted to make a quick buck!

[blackrocksword]

I hope Blizzard provides much more powerful machines this time round as their servers. It seems to me the ones they used in D2 are ageing, as evident from being dropped by games when there is too much strain (e.g. Ubers dying for instance).

It's very frustrating, I mean when I first tried to log in to battle.net when D2 was very first released, it was something close to impossible, if not entirely impossible thing to do. But hey it's free to play, besides Blizzard fixed this problem not too long after, so no complaints there.

If Blizzard (and I do not want that to happen) decide to impose a fee, it better be a minimal one (just enough to cover the bandwidth or something). Then again, the only information transferred shouldn't cost a lot of bytes seeing that a lot of the in game data (graphics etc) is processed locally within our machines. Netcode efficiency comes into mind here.

As for hacking, I think it is probably too early to judge, but I agree that the new map system and 3D model looks "harder" to hack, so it's only good news I suppose.