Diablo III Wild Speculation and Rumor Mongering Abounds

[Kirth]

I'll put the ETA of Activision selling items directly to the playerbase at 6 months from launch. Anyone want to go lower/higher?

From Launch.

That would kill the game. You can't have items being sold directly to the players and have players selling items.

How would you know since the video linked earlier states all sellers are anonymous.

[DLRiley]

I like this bitch fight over the AH. Regular RMT -> Devs sell items to players. Blizzard RMT -> Anonymous players sell items to players. Devs get cut. What will happen anyway -> Players use ebay.

[Paelos]

Why would you give ebay a cut instead of Blizzard?

[WayAbvPar]

Still gonna play.  Don't really care about the SoJ to $ transformation. Definitely don't care that I have to be logged in to play a Blizzard game.

Yep.

Now, to teach my 2.5 year old to grind out loots for daddy to sell...

[Ingmar]

Who plays with non-friends?

You're asking the wrong question. (The answer is lots of people though.) I would bet good money that even most of the people who *only* played with friends, played with them on closed battle.net games, not LAN connections.

[Mrbloodworth]

Battle.net in 2000? LOL. I hear Gamespy was also stable. At this point, I don't really care. I'm still going to play it.  Just seems gone are the days when you buy a game, and play it your way. They should just tack "online" to the end.

I welcome our new loot grind overlords.

[K9]

This is a pretty retarded argument.

[Lantyssa]

You're asking the wrong question. (The answer is lots of people though.) I would bet good money that even most of the people who *only* played with friends, played with them on closed battle.net games, not LAN connections.

LAN or TCP/IP only.  I avoided Bnet due to not feeling the need to play on their servers, shitty network verses smooth local, the 90 day deletion policy, and an inability to edit characters (mostly for skill refunds).

[Mrbloodworth]

^

[Ingmar]

Yeah, the 90 day deletion policy sucked. And you can LOL all you want BW, but yes, millions of people used battle.net, even back in 2000. LAN was fine if you know, you lived with all the people you wanted to play with, or were willing to haul your PC around for random evening entertainment. I doubt that was ever a majority of the crowd though. TCP/IP was better, but I remember having some issues setting that up with some people. Battle.net worked for everyone, so we just used that.

[LK]

You know what, fuck it. Most of the things I have a problem with are subjective. I bet that's true for a lot of people. If people want to trade digital goods for real money, and that makes them happy, fine. The high ideal of video game environments being a hallowed space of integrity and fairness don't apply to multiplayer games with persistent digital goods. You either profit by it or someone else does.

[Mrbloodworth]

LAN was fine if you know, you lived with all the people you wanted to play with.......... TCP/IP was better

Imagine that. I never had any need, want or care for people playing on battle.net. But apparently, I now have to be on it, so I can look at the cash shop AH.

You know what, fuck it. Most of the things I have a problem with are subjective. I bet that's true for a lot of people. If people want to trade digital goods for real money, and that makes them happy, fine. The high ideal of video game environments being a hallowed space of integrity and fairness don't apply to multiplayer games with persistent digital goods. You either profit by it or someone else does.

My gripes are completely subjective as well. What I don't like is the forced participation and loss of features important to me to support a RMT AH.

Is there any reason not to allow LAN TCP/IP and no battle.net for those of us who do not care about the AH?

[Mosesandstick]

I'd guess that Blizzards move to requiring online play is because they think they can make it mandatory in Asia without any setbacks, the Western markets will take what they're given.

[K9]

I see no forced participation

Always online != Always multiplayer.

[Ratman_tf]

the Western markets will take what they're given.

[Mrbloodworth]

I see no forced participation

Always online != Always multiplayer.

I do believe one needs a battle.net account, and must play on that network. I have never brought up single player.

[Ingmar]

I see no forced participation

Always online != Always multiplayer.

I do believe one needs a battle.net account, and must play on that network. I have never brought up single player.

You still aren't 'participating' any more than I'm participating when I play single player SC2.

[DLRiley]

Blizzard announces that they will revolutionize ARPG's by reskinning D2.
 "FUCK YEAH, ZOMBIE JESUS! FUCK YEAH, ZOMBIE JESUS"
Blizzard annouces that they will give you 5 dollars when you sell your virtual crap on BlizzardEbay.
 "FUCK YOU BLIZZARD AND YOUR TRYING TO GIVE ME MONEY!"

[Tebonas]

"Always online" means "No playing Diablo 3 on a Notebook when not at home." A prime example of when I played Diablo 2.

Really, while people may concentrate on the other issue, thats the real tragedy of this announcement.

[Mrbloodworth]

I see no forced participation

Always online != Always multiplayer.

I do believe one needs a battle.net account, and must play on that network. I have never brought up single player.

You still aren't 'participating' any more than I'm participating when I play single player SC2.

I have not brought up single player.

[Malakili]

"Always online" means "No playing Diablo 3 on a Notebook when not at home." A prime example of when I played Diablo 2.

Really, while people may concentrate on the other issue, thats the real tragedy of this announcement.

Then play Torchlight 2.  It'll run better on a notebook too.  As I said earlier, I've planned on buying both pretty much all along.

[Ingmar]

I see no forced participation

Always online != Always multiplayer.

I do believe one needs a battle.net account, and must play on that network. I have never brought up single player.

You still aren't 'participating' any more than I'm participating when I play single player SC2.

I have not brought up single player.

Nobody is going to force you to let randoms into your multiplayer games either.

[Malakili]

I see no forced participation

Always online != Always multiplayer.

I do believe one needs a battle.net account, and must play on that network. I have never brought up single player.

You still aren't 'participating' any more than I'm participating when I play single player SC2.

I have not brought up single player.

Nobody is going to force you to let randoms into your multiplayer games either.

He seems mainly upset that he can't use a character editor to start new characters at whatever level he wants.  I think it goes with the bigger issue of no mods.

[Tebonas]

Then play Torchlight 2.  It'll run better on a notebook too.  As I said earlier, I've planned on buying both pretty much all along.

Thats exactly what I will do. Can I still be pissed I won't be able to buy a game I was looking forward for years, though?

[Malakili]

Then play Torchlight 2.  It'll run better on a notebook too.  As I said earlier, I've planned on buying both pretty much all along.

Thats exactly what I will do. Can I still be pissed I won't be able to buy a game I was looking forward for years, though?

You can, I'm just kind of surprised that people didn't expect this.

[Merusk]

I'm more surprised it's expected.

The times have indeed changed.

[Ingmar]

Then play Torchlight 2.  It'll run better on a notebook too.  As I said earlier, I've planned on buying both pretty much all along.

Thats exactly what I will do. Can I still be pissed I won't be able to buy a game I was looking forward for years, though?

You can, I'm just kind of surprised that people didn't expect this.

Yeah after SC2 it is a bit surprising that anyone sees this as a surprise. Writing was on the wall.

[Tebonas]

Did you people play another SC2 than me? Mine had an offline single player mode.

[Malakili]

I'm more surprised it's expected.

The times have indeed changed.

I saw it coming the moment they said all WoW accounts were being converted to/merged with battle.net accounts.  I could have sworn we had this exact discussion somewhere on these boards.

[Ingmar]

Did you people play another SC2 than me? Mine had an offline single player mode.

Sure, but it was moving in that direction. Everyone's monocles popping off is more surprising to me than this.

[Azuredream]

Just smacks of "evil corporate overlords" to me. If they continue to make great games, I'll keep buying them but I'm not going to go out of my way to support a company that doesn't give a shit about its customers. The day they bomb a release or something similar I'm not sticking around.

[LK]

There's a way we wish things could be, and the way they actually are.

I don't think it needs to be restated that the reason the game is online-only and that there's a push towards that is to deter piracy and make sure every copy out there is a fully-paid and registered one. It's Big Brother of business in order to insure full compliance with the developer's / business's wishes. That's the future, I don't think anyone's arguing against that baseline policy.

As we become more inter-connected as a society, this becomes less of a problem. The future is always being online where-ever you are anyway, the way things are going. The people getting the shaft are the people who want to play the game in unusual or inconvenient circumstances. It may reach a point where you can authenticate a game session through 3G or something nuts like that. Who knows? But the key is being able to validate a product's existence when it is brought into existence. Isn't there a running "Strict system in case even ONE person might abuse the system" mindset in politics? Cause I see that with video games now and piracy, however rampant it is.

I am sure you can come up with an edge-case example where you'd like to play an Online-Only game, and Pardo's right, it's edge case, and I'm sure Blizzard feels bad for ya, but they're looking at the big picture. I can see the emotional / empathetic argument about how creating a system that shafts a certain segment of your customers is not a good one, but I also see creating a system that shafts a few customers to completely obliterate piracy as a good one, too.

[Azuredream]

There's a way we wish things could be, and the way they actually are.

I don't think it needs to be restated that the reason the game is online-only and that there's a push towards that is to deter piracy and make sure every copy out there is a fully-paid and registered one. It's Big Brother of business in order to insure full compliance with the developer's / business's wishes. That's the future, I don't think anyone's arguing against that baseline policy.

As we become more inter-connected as a society, this becomes less of a problem. The future is always being online where-ever you are anyway, the way things are going. The people getting the shaft are the people who want to play the game in unusual or inconvenient circumstances. It may reach a point where you can authenticate a game session through 3G or something nuts like that. Who knows? But the key is being able to validate a product's existence when it is brought into existence. Isn't there a running "Strict system in case even ONE person might abuse the system" mindset in politics? Cause I see that with video games now and piracy, however rampant it is.

I am sure you can come up with an edge-case example where you'd like to play an Online-Only game, and Pardo's right, it's edge case, and I'm sure Blizzard feels bad for ya, but they're looking at the big picture. I can see the emotional / empathetic argument about how creating a system that shafts a certain segment of your customers is not a good one, but I also see creating a system that shafts a few customers to completely obliterate piracy as a good one, too.

I don't think "playing without internet" is really an edge case. If your internet goes out, you're traveling, maybe your internet just sucks or any other situation that would make the internet unavailable means you can't play their game anymore. It would be different if, like you said, we had some kind of remote authentication, but we don't (to my knowledge).

[Malakili]

There's a way we wish things could be, and the way they actually are.

I don't think it needs to be restated that the reason the game is online-only and that there's a push towards that is to deter piracy and make sure every copy out there is a fully-paid and registered one. It's Big Brother of business in order to insure full compliance with the developer's / business's wishes. That's the future, I don't think anyone's arguing against that baseline policy.

As we become more inter-connected as a society, this becomes less of a problem. The future is always being online where-ever you are anyway, the way things are going. The people getting the shaft are the people who want to play the game in unusual or inconvenient circumstances. It may reach a point where you can authenticate a game session through 3G or something nuts like that. Who knows? But the key is being able to validate a product's existence when it is brought into existence. Isn't there a running "Strict system in case even ONE person might abuse the system" mindset in politics? Cause I see that with video games now and piracy, however rampant it is.

I am sure you can come up with an edge-case example where you'd like to play an Online-Only game, and Pardo's right, it's edge case, and I'm sure Blizzard feels bad for ya, but they're looking at the big picture. I can see the emotional / empathetic argument about how creating a system that shafts a certain segment of your customers is not a good one, but I also see creating a system that shafts a few customers to completely obliterate piracy as a good one, too.

I don't think "playing without internet" is really an edge case. If your internet goes out, you're traveling, maybe your internet just sucks or any other situation that would make the internet unavailable means you can't play their game anymore. It would be different if, like you said, we had some kind of remote authentication, but we don't (to my knowledge).

As near as I can tell, I think Blizzard is saying yes, that is a edge case among their desired playerbase.

[Mrbloodworth]

Makes me wonder if single player is also hosted.