Diablo III - It's official

[Grall]

I've been continuously online since december 2000, I don't like 'always on DURM', and I'm still going to buy it. Like I'd NOT buy diablo 3 after more than a decade after the previous one, which I played at least 8 hours every week for almost five years straight? Rotfl, you kidding?

 

[Grall]

Actually Tycho does a much better job in the article.

By their own admission, Diablo isn’t not really focused around a PVP experience; if you’re playing with someone who has duped items or whatever, all it means is that you will be more likely to defeat Satan. Without a means to gain advantage over another, “cheating” as a concept becomes substantially more opaque. Who is the cheated party, precisely? Satan the Devil? Fuck him, who cares.

Well, for starters, I care, because I don't want to play in a game where all the other guys have duped, hacked superitems that kill an act endboss in three blows. I want a clean game experience, so I can play the game it was meant to be played. Without cheating. Thank you.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Well, for starters, I care, because I don't want to play in a game where all the other guys have duped, hacked superitems that kill an act endboss in three blows. I want a clean game experience, so I can play the game it was meant to be played. Without cheating. Thank you.

Yes and we all know persistent online guarantees that experience, we all know that no one has ever been able to cheat in wow... right?

 

[I.S.T.]

Me, I have a persistent connection.

I am not going to buy this game. Why?

1. It's utter bullshit DRM.

2. I can't guarantee my connection will stay that way. Not only have I had bad luck in this area, but you can't predict the damn future.

3. They keep forgetting people with laptops who travel a lot. Nice way to fuck them over, Activision!

 

[Grall]

Yes and we all know persistent online guarantees that experience, we all know that no one has ever been able to cheat in wow... right?

There's no hacked or duped items in WoW, no. It's a clean experience, the worst you can do is auto-piloting your toon using a botting program (although I've not seen any bots in ages now, maybe because Blizzard improved their Warden overwatch thingy) or do some primitive macroing with a gamer-type mouse or keyboard which doesn't really give you any advantage anyway.

...So I'm not really sure what you're getting at, actually.

 

[aaronspink]

On one hand, one of the most annoying aspects about playing WoW is every Tuesday, the servers go down for maintenance. Down times can vary from a restart, which usually lasts about 15 minutes, or full maintenance, i.e preparing for an upcoming patch. Duration on those days can vary from 6-8 hours. While I understand completely how obnoxious it is to rely on server status, I'm hoping D3 doesn't follow suit. On the other hand, I imagine it makes Blizzard's job a lot easier when providing new content, like patches and updates. The argument lies in a players taste, whether they prefer to play alone or with friends. Personally, I don't envision myself playing D3 alone, very often, so it works for me.

Part of that is blizzard having an absolutely archaic patching system. Compare it with a modern one like Rift's where major content patches are in many cases shorter than bliz's weekly restarts! Trion will post a 30 minute downtime for a major patch and everything will be back in 10 minutes!

 

[KimB]

Me, I have a persistent connection.

I am not going to buy this game. Why?

1. It's utter bullshit DRM.

2. I can't guarantee my connection will stay that way. Not only have I had bad luck in this area, but you can't predict the damn future.

3. They keep forgetting people with laptops who travel a lot. Nice way to fuck them over, Activision!

^ This.

I still have the bad taste in my mouth left by Starcraft 2. So I am absolutely not going to buy Diablo 3. I may pirate it, to see what it's like, but I'm sure as hell not going to buy it. Though honestly, it might be best if I just forget about the whole sordid affair and enjoy the many other games I enjoy instead.

 

[Gubbi]

Blizzard currently have 11.1 million people paying a monthly fee for the privilege to play an always-online game, World of Warcraft.

95% of people who played Diablo 2 more than casually, did so on Battle.net (how many here played through Hell difficulty in single player?). To this day you can play on battle.net free of charge, 11 years after launch.

Cheers

 

[AlphaWolf]

There's no hacked or duped items in WoW, no.

You might want to check your history, because it has happened quite often.

It's a clean experience, the worst you can do is auto-piloting your toon using a botting program (although I've not seen any bots in ages now, maybe because Blizzard improved their Warden overwatch thingy) or do some primitive macroing with a gamer-type mouse or keyboard which doesn't really give you any advantage anyway.

...So I'm not really sure what you're getting at, actually.

Apparently you really have no clue how much cheating goes on. There are a vast number of hacks in WoW aside from glider type programs such as teleport and speed hacks.

And I'm not sure what your concern is about duped items, when people can just pay cash for items off of the AH.

Blizzard currently have 11.1 million people paying a monthly fee for the privilege to play an always-online game, World of Warcraft.

95% of people who played Diablo 2 more than casually, did so on Battle.net (how many here played through Hell difficulty in single player?). To this day you can play on battle.net free of charge, 11 years after launch.

Cheers

Ask those 11.1 million people how happy they are on patch day when the servers keep dropping them or how many of them would love to do away with the constant gold trade spam and phishing that goes on because of the persistent online.

 

[Gubbi]

Ask those 11.1 million people how happy they are on patch day when the servers keep dropping them.

They would love to do away with it.

But they still play, and they still pay. This should indicate how little an issue always-on is.

or how many of them would love to do away with the constant gold trade spam and phishing that goes on because of the persistent online.

RMAH is going to curb trade spam.

Cheers

 

[KimB]

Blizzard currently have 11.1 million people paying a monthly fee for the privilege to play an always-online game, World of Warcraft.

Yeah, um, persistent worlds are like that. Diablo 3 is not a persistent world.

95% of people who played Diablo 2 more than casually, did so on Battle.net (how many here played through Hell difficulty in single player?). To this day you can play on battle.net free of charge, 11 years after launch.

How do you know this? And by the way, I have played through hell difficulty quite a few times on single-player in Diablo 2.

 

[I.S.T.]

Add me to the played through Hell mode on SP club, though I only did it once. Was not fun, did it more to see if I could.

I just barely could at the time. I doubt I could now.

I played D2 both online and off. Mostly online, but a large part of that was just something to do to spend time with my brother. If it wasn't for that, my online time would be cut by half if not more. I've spent at least 150 hours in SP.

 

[Grall]

You might want to check your history, because it has happened quite often.

Dupe bugs happened only a handful of times, and I can't remember any such case since vanilla, maybe burning crusade.

Apparently you really have no clue how much cheating goes on. There are a vast number of hacks in WoW aside from glider type programs such as teleport and speed hacks.

The only time speed hacks give you any advantage is with farming tradeskill materials (typically by a bot) or in PvP, and in both cases they're blatantly obvious and Blizzard will ban such players. I can't even remember the last time I saw an obvious cheater in WoW, and I've played since early 2005 pretty much.

Cheating hasn't affected me anywhere as much as the rampant cheating did in D2, and even more so in original D1, where you could have infinite health and mana hacks and so on.

And I'm not sure what your concern is about duped items, when people can just pay cash for items off of the AH.

Cash for items off the AH would be one thing, that'd be a legitimately acquired game, duping would just lead to everyone + dog having the currently uberest gear for their class, or at least enough people so that grouping with others would not be much fun.

Ask those 11.1 million people how happy they are on patch day when the servers keep dropping them

WoW patch days can be fucking rough, I readily agree with that. Sometimes you wonder what the frak Blizzard is doing when they've been testing a patch on the public test realm for months, things run pretty smoothly there and then all hell breaks loose when they go live with it. It's like their test servers and live servers use fundamentally different architectures or something. But that's just major patches, and it HAS been much better recently than it used to be. Cataclysm patching has been quite smooth in comparison to previous years.

or how many of them would love to do away with the constant gold trade spam and phishing that goes on because of the persistent online.

You can get rid of the spam using addons, or just turning off the public chat channels. Even without the gold spam there's zero intelligent discourse in the public channels anyway so there's basically no reason to have them enabled.

 

[Gubbi]

And by the way, I have played through hell difficulty quite a few times on single-player in Diablo 2.

By your own admission, not without cheating. It is endlessly frustating to find lots of über gear that does squat all for your sword specialized barbarian.

I played single player Diablo 2 until the 4th act on nightmare difficulty, and simply gave up because the game was so frustrating. I had completely stopped playing the game when a friend of mine insisted I try battle.net. Within a month I had 5 characters north of level 80.

Diablo 2 was ten times the fun online. The game was supposed to be played online.

I know you and I.S.T. disagree, but IMO doing away with single player is doing people a favour; players are immidiately introduced to the cooperative experience that made Diablo 2 so addictive.

Cheers

 

[GZ007]

Diablo 2 was ten times the fun online. The game was supposed to be played online.

Cheers

Thats why it had LAN/IPX. U could play multiplayer without a single internet conection.
Hell difficulty with the mob immunities and health regen required more players. I had a feeling that the champions always spawned with the worst combination of skills for your character .

 

[KimB]

By your own admission, not without cheating. It is endlessly frustating to find lots of über gear that does squat all for your sword specialized barbarian.

Nah, I've done it without cheating too. It's difficult for some classes, but not so much for a well-built sorceress. Amazon is second-easiest without great gear. Yes, if you want to make it through hell difficulty with a barbarian or paladin, you need some really good gear.

But that's where a little bit of (very mild) cheating comes in. You can go totally nuts with the cheating, such as making completely-custom items that have insane stats. The most I generally did was duplicate runes. But that's largely because the drop rate for runes is so insanely low that it is virtually impossible to get any good ones without dedicating your life to the game.

Diablo 2 was ten times the fun online. The game was supposed to be played online.

The players you meet online pissed me off. All the time. That's definitely not something I want to be forced into. Though it is good that they've removed the single most annoying aspect of Diablo 2 online (the fact that grabbing items was a free-for-all), there are so many jerks online, especially for an open game of this type, that it just doesn't appeal to me at all.

I know you and I.S.T. disagree, but IMO doing away with single player is doing people a favour; players are immidiately introduced to the cooperative experience that made Diablo 2 so addictive.

Yeah, I'm sure they're going to win over tons of players when new players are viciously insulted their first game out.

 

[Malo]

I'm not sure of any game I've spent more hours in than Diablo 2 over my whole life. Many hundreds and hundreds of hours. In all that time I think I spent a few hours playing on battle.net, which was during the beta. A majority was spent LAN with friends, the rest single player.

So I guess I'm in that group of Diablo players who should be pissed at this? I'm not though because a) I'm used to having a persistent internet connection at the locations I might game, and b) I don't travel anywhere.

I'm sure their reasons for doing this are quite valid and honestly real, and I'm also sure that this is a very satisfactory decision from the higher ups at Activision whom are rubbing their hands with glee.

 

[Richard]

I've said this before and I'll say it again: people are confusing the issue here. if Blizzard says this decision was not influenced by DRM/Piracy they can simply add a button to the caracter creation screen for offline-only mode.

Those that don't have a problem with the constant-connection requirement surely also don't have a problem if they see an extra button on the character creation screen, right?

 

[Malo]

Then you'll get people crying that they couldn't take their single player character online to play with friends, which you could do in D2.

 

[Dresden]

One things that majorly concerns me is scaling with graphics. WoW is one of the worst cases of poor optimization. No multi-GPU support whatsoever, mediocre DX11, I'm pretty sure it's not fully supported, and it feels like performance reaches a plateau, regardless of your system. The system I had years ago should have amounted to more than an average of 60 FPS, let alone my system now which should be pulling off indescribable frames rates, alas it doesn't. I kinda noticed the same thing with SC2, therefore I worry about Diablo 3.