Diablo III

Uh... well, yea, I don't think Blizz cares about single player mode. Diablo 3 is going to net them a huge amount of money, the people who want single player are in the tiniest of minorities, and Blizz is going to see this based on their sales and continue to disregard single player mode. I could be wrong, but I think that's what the future holds for Blizz games regarding single player.

^I concur.

Not to mention that online-only play is the best way to combat piracy that anyone's come up with so far. Oh, I'm sure a few folks will be running private servers but it's relatively easy to track those down and issue Cease & Desist orders if Blizz cares enough.

edited 2nd Aug '11 12:38:31 PM by Fighteer

Make of this what you will.

I make of that that I should do a bout of an Evil Laughter.

I hate when people post links but don't quote excerpts. I can't read that until I get home from work.

Full transcript.

Okay, yeah, that's plain vanilla. That is what they're trying to do, really — a point blank admission that people will farm gold anyway so why not just make it legit and aboveboard?

Like I said before, though, this is going to feed the drive for taxation of income derived from online gaming. After all, if I earn $1,000 selling stuff in Diablo III, it's exactly like earning income from any other job. Governments will be going after that like crazy.

edited 2nd Aug '11 2:21:45 PM by Fighteer

And I'm gonna sit in my Eastern Europe backwater and watch - we've got far, far less developed law base for internet here.

ah the taxation, another valid point. If it ever comes to that, I think whatever taxation system that the government sets up will be all screwed up initially, leading to a U.S. wide audit of gamers.

I have to say, I agree completely about the gold-farming thing. What's the difference between somebody who does Mephisto runs all day so he can sell the items on eBay and somebody who does Mephisto runs all day so he can trade the items in the bazaar? As long as they don't join my game and bother me, not much.

The whole "always on" thing is what irks me. Most people use wireless internet connections which are almost always prone to instability. Add to that the fact that you can't mod the game at all (bad idea Blizzard, there's a reason people still play Warcraft 3, and it's not for the multiplayer), and I've just lost interest in it. It's hard for me to not look at this and boo Blizzard for doing all the things that they avoided in Diablo 2 that gave that game its longevity. And because it's the whole "always on" business, that means there won't be LAN either, dooming people to rely on Blizzard's servers all the time. That means if they have to take them down for maintenance in, say, all of Europe, nobody can play.

It gets worse since we know the DRM (not a service, blatant DRM) doesn't work. Assassin's Creed 2 had the same thing, and it was still cracked and pirated. Blizzard aren't going to catch pirates with this, they're just going to enforce a pointless rule that says "brief timeout? PIRATE!" on everyone.

This makes me very, very sad :(

Im gonna go on a length and say this: I refuse to buy the game unless the benefits outweigh the detriments AKA it better be damn well worth being online all the time to play.

Well, there will not be any guys who just cheated themselves a perfect set of gear and showed up to ruin your day.
There will still be guys that bought a reasonably good set of gear from their credit card and showed up to mildly spoil your day.

Also, I still think there will be botters

of course there will be botters.

since now they can turn a bot on. go have a life, and come home and ebay the shit for real income.

Goddam,n, I'm tempted to bot now >.>

edited 11th Aug '11 1:21:50 PM by Midgetsnowman

^Which is pretty much what happens now in wow
The only question is the quality of attempts to stop them: wow fails.
Maybe Diablo will have better antibot and there will be few.
Or maybe it will not and it will become botting heaven.

Diablo is different in that it's farming of gear and ability to lock yourself away from other players that could report you are bot-friendly conditions, real money AH is a bot-tempting condition. Blizz on the other hand have Serious Business going on: bots would bring them money through AH but at the same time scare away the playerbase.

edited 11th Aug '11 1:39:51 PM by Adannor

I have yet to see solid evidence that World Of Warcraft's antibot measures fail, because I have yet to actually see a genuine bot in all of Cataclysm. I hear about them all the time in BG's, but that's irrelevant to the point at hand because AFK'ing for Honor gear is not something that earns you real world cash.

There will be far more motivation to bot in D3 given that you can explicitly get real money for your efforts, but at the same time there's a strong risk that Blizz will sue the pants off of you if you're caught.

Its harder to catch if you create a private game for yourself and just set it to a farming.

I'm on Russian servers which are rumourly worse staffed with GMs, but bots really exist here.

Also, how frequently do you observe AH for herbs ores and fish?

edited 11th Aug '11 1:43:31 PM by Adannor

I buy infrequently at the AH, having a wide enough variety of characters to be generally able to farm what I need. When I do need something, I use my Auctioneer stats to decide what's a good price. So I really can't say to what extent bots influence the economy — I'd say it's far more likely that a few rich players do it as a hobby.

The sign of a botter unloading a night's haul is a couple thousands of some material for the half of the market price. If often gets scooped out immediately so it isn't noticeable with rare visits.

I once stumbled upon such a downpour of Volatile Earth when farming the guild cauldron recipe and just yesterday saw around a thousand of deepsea sagefish priced at 1.2g instead of normal 2. Very clearly bots selling for a fast profit.

edited 11th Aug '11 1:52:48 PM by Adannor

So what? If it makes prices generally lower I don't mind a bit.

Yes, I too am only annoyed with them if I was going to sell something at the same time they happened.
But the argument is over their existence and this is a sign of it.

My concern is if they hamper my gameplay or gain advantages that I cannot through playing properly. For example, if I'm cruising around Twilight Highlands or Uldum for herbs/ore, and someone beats me to the node — that's fair and square. No skin off my nose. If someone's teleporting from node to node and harvesting them from underground, that is a problem. But I have not witnessed any such behavior in recent memory.

edited 11th Aug '11 2:21:25 PM by Fighteer

It's always fun to observe the reactions after Blizzard makes any announcement at all, because there are so many people who cry Ruined FOREVER just for the sake of crying Ruined FOREVER.

I understand why some people would be disappointed by the inability to play the game offline, but this is Blizzard making a choice between the sales figures of those people and the sales figures of people who could otherwise pirate the game. Money talks.

I haven't yet heard a good reason for why auction houses working with real money would be a bad thing.