I've read plenty, hold your horses.
Plus that model may work fine for people who get great internet connection and massive bandwidth to download games with. Thing is there are places in 1st world nations that don't get it. People that have PC's and systems but don't use the internet, they exist. Let's just screw them over.
Maybe I don't want my computer to have additional lag from having to connect to server to get game I bought to play offline. How fantastic is it when the server crashes from traffic, or goes down for maintenance or another reason.
All this to combat the blown out of proportions piracy problem.
edited 2nd May '12 8:16:16 PM by Vyctorian
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In the modern consumer environment, the best way to deal with that concern is to not buy games that use always-online DRM. Your wallet speaks louder than any other words you could utter. Pirating the game as a form of protest against its DRM is the single most counterproductive thing you can do.
As someone who has a reliable Internet connection — and more than one game that I have interest in playing at any given time — the issues around Diablo III are highly overblown. I also probably wouldn't have bought it myself, save that I got it for "free" with my Annual Pass subscription to World Of Warcraft, but that has nothing to do with its DRM.
edited 2nd May '12 8:20:17 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I'm not exactly sure if this is for piracy reasons. I remember something on the lines of it having to do with this new market system they have in the game. They talked about this on Extra Credits...
@Psyga: The in-game auction house is a valid reason to have the single-player game available in an online format, but it's still not an absolute justification for making it online-only — someone playing it in offline single-player mode would simply not use that resource.
Of course, if you want to use the AH (particularly the real-currency exchange), keeping it all on Blizzard's servers is the only way to effectively combat fraud.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Yeah, having the item generation code in the main downloadable package opened the door to many exploits. And considering that with the AH (both in terms of gold and RMT) is a major feature of the game, that trumps off-line play at least in Blizzard's view.
It's not really about DRM, at least not that much.
Democracy is the process in which we determine the government that we deserveWould take a bit of elbow grease, but crackers broke Ubisoft's perma-online DRM by spoofing the handshake. If what you're saying is true about levels being only available on the server, I can see crackers breaking that system out of spite and not being deterred by how hard it is. I mean, for the most part, crackers are doing it for two reasons: 1) protest or b) lulz. I know that if I had the technical know how and the time to do this, I'd be having a ball trying to break through this.
PS. immediately what comes to mind for breaking a system where stuff is stored online is that when you're playing, those level/AI/whatever files have to be downloaded to your local system somewhere. Mine those and save a copy before they get deleted, and bam, you have the entire game after a playthrough.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." TwitterTechnically, that is exactly what it's doing. It's just that art and sound assets are vastly cheaper to store on the client's side.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"No, there's a difference. What I'm talking about, the client never has to render anything-it just streams video and sends commands. There's not an infinitely large block of video files that are saved, there's various textures etc that's saved and the commands are used to render those textures.
If you actually never even gave the components of the game, but just video of the game being played, then it'd be impossible to duplicate.
Services do exist that stream games in HD video, but they require a very high quality connection — far more so than the client-server model of games like Diablo III. I don't think it's feasible in today's environment.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"World Of Warcraft does have private servers that pop up every now and then, but they are invariably of awful quality, are taken down whenever Blizzard finds them, and do not seem to make any significant dent in the game's subscriber base.
Has anyone hacked Starcraft II to run on anything other than battle.net? If not, then I don't think Diablo III is going to have any problems, since it uses the same platform.
edited 3rd May '12 9:56:04 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Also did a search through my private game torrent site and there were like 5 golden torrents of SC 2 that would generate keyfiles for you and lock down the client to make sure it didn't contact Battle.net
^one of my e-acquaintances has a private server and he's kind of dumb, so I imagine it's not that hard.
edited 3rd May '12 11:04:50 AM by ch00beh
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
Those work because Starcraft II operates standalone for single-player. It doesn't require a server backend except for multi. Diablo III won't be self-contained for singleplayer.
edited 3rd May '12 11:21:10 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"the link I posted allows you to play with people online by using private, spoofed servers, though.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." TwitterNobody's saying that such things don't exist. The point is that they make far less of a dent percentage-wise.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"oh, yeah, that makes sense. Basically the most effective way to reduce piracy is to make people dependent on you as a service as opposed to a product. Someone else can step in to provide the same service, but that means they have to be actively devoting time and resources into it.
basically what you've already said with the non-zero marginal cost thing.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter@Vyc: Yeah. Their episode was simply called The Diablo III Marketplace
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@Vyctorian: Have you actually read anything that's been talked about so far or are you just pushing buttons to see how far you can get?
There is a non-zero cost to physical counterfeiting, that being the cost to actually produce the object in question and make it superficially resemble the original. As one example, counterfeit books are not a major concern for stores to the best of my knowledge and haven't been for as long as I've been aware of such concerns.
Bootleg videos, on the other hand, have been, because copying them is relatively simple — albeit with a marginal cost in the form of the physical media. Tapes, CD's, same thing. The Internet age and high quality digital media reproduction have reduced the marginal cost to zero, making copying trivial and, in essence, compelling content producers to use DRM to protect their sales.
Technically, the major issue with physical media is simply that once you're done with it, you can give or sell it to someone else; said consumption provides zero benefit to the producer of the product. Digital DRM deals with that issue quite nicely.
edited 2nd May '12 8:13:55 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"