Tycho is dead on, the only reason they don't have offline play is because people who just buy the game and don't give out their personal info can't be "monetized". Fuck that noise.
I have a damn good always on internet connection but I won't be getting this game. I don't chat with other people, I play solo, I don't trade. It isn't anyone's damn business when and for how long I play a single player game. If the game maker wants my metrics to make the game better I'm happy to help but give me access to the data and the option to upload it manually.
Sometimes I use game mods to "cheat" if I feel like the game system is broken or tedious. I didn't feel like leveling a druid in d2 so I made one with an editor and gave him the best gear. I duped runes to make neat weapons instead of farming them. I started my paladin at level 60 (I think) because I didn't feel like playing through normal and nightmare just to see if the build would work in hell. Why shouldn't I be able to do any of those things? I'm not making the game less fun for anyone else, I'm just PLAYING with the stupid game I bought.
Oh right I know why, because EA can't skim some off the top of my AH purchases if I do that. To all of you who buy this game just imagine Bobby Kotick's face while he is getting a blowjob every time you log in. Because that is what you are paying for.
That picture of that one hairy male cosplaying as Faye is one of them.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
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HunterChemist with a heart of AuRegistered Userregular
It is surprising that they cut offline singleplayer. They've told us more than once, as recently as blizzcon, that we would have that option.
They were always clear that they wanted to discourage that, perhaps by limiting certain features such as shared stash, and instead encourage online co-op by giving you a companion for normal.
There's a massive difference between discouraging it and removing it.
They most likely ran into some logic jam with trying to include offline play and have all the functionality needed for an auction house with protection from the dubious folks that like to dupe and hack.
It seems the decision to keep the auction house won out. It sucks that a percentage of the community that would never and have never duped or haxxed the Gibson and will be inconvenienced due to this. Some might not be able to play at all. That's always a problem. The whole point of making a game is to get people to play it.
I can understand the perspective of both sides of the coin. Blizzard doesn't want their game pirated and they don't won't their community and game balanced butt fucked by those vile denizens of the intertrons that get off on that kind of thing. It's both a cash money business decision and a don't mess with my baby decision. On the other hand, they're penalizing people who want to legitimately pay them for their product and play the game in an offline fashion. Punishing those who want to do something the right way is never a good business practice. I hope there's some middle ground that can be reached without pushing off launch to 2013.
To all of you who buy this game just imagine Bobby Kotick's face while he is getting a blowjob every time you log in. Because that is what you are paying for.
It is surprising that they cut offline singleplayer. They've told us more than once, as recently as blizzcon, that we would have that option.
They were always clear that they wanted to discourage that, perhaps by limiting certain features such as shared stash, and instead encourage online co-op by giving you a companion for normal.
There's a massive difference between discouraging it and removing it.
They most likely ran into some logic jam with trying to include offline play and have all the functionality needed for an auction house with protection from the dubious folks that like to dupe and hack.
It seems the decision to keep the auction house won out. It sucks that a percentage of the community that would never and have never duped or haxxed the Gibson and will be inconvenienced due to this. Some might not be able to play at all. That's always a problem. The whole point of making a game is to get people to play it.
I can understand the perspective of both sides of the coin. Blizzard doesn't want their game pirated and they don't won't their community and game balanced butt fucked by those vile denizens of the intertrons that get off on that kind of thing. It's both a cash money business decision and a don't mess with my baby decision. On the other hand, they're penalizing people who want to legitimately pay them for their product and play the game in an offline fashion. Punishing those who want to do something the right way is never a good business practice. I hope there's some middle ground that can be reached without pushing off launch to 2013.
Except that really isn't an issue. D2 solved this. You have your online character, managed by Blizzard's servers and then you have your offline characters you can mess around with all you want. You can't import any offline generated data onto bnet anyway and if people are hacking the client to create items while on bnet, they're still going to do it
yeah it seems very much like a fake thing to bitch about
who actually gave a shit about D2's single-player? Who are these mythical, non-battle.net people? I want to meet them.
Diablo 3 is basically like a MMO at this point, might as well accept it.
"OH BUT MY CONNECTION COULD DIE AND THEN MY SAVED GAME IS LOST"
how is that different than playing multiplayer anything and your connection poops out
besides, do you really think they'd institute a system where if your connection is lost it IMMEDIATELY SHUTS DOWN EVERYTHING and it can't possibly save oh god my three hours of work
I'm sorry no
bitch at me when Civ VI has online-full-time-DRM shit for singleplayer
Wait, are you saying that Civ has a more compelling single player experience than Diablo? What?
Unless you look at that and think maybe the reason they have to do that is because the game is not balanced to be played solo unless the game provides you with npc assistance.
Hrmmmmm
I agree with you in some respects here bale but uh
This is like saying that Baldurs Gate is best played in mutliplayer cos it has to give you NPCs if you're alone
I see Druhim has entirely stopped reading my posts
I'm really not interested in arguing about this anymore with you
I think it's you that's not reading what Dru is saying. You argue that the game is multiplayer by design while Dru and others are saying "If that is so why is there still single-player mode that simply requires you be online." TF2 is inherently multi-player in that you really can't play it at all alone. That has never been the case with Diablo.
You can't import any offline generated data onto bnet anyway and if people are hacking the client to create items while on bnet, they're still going to do it
I'm not a code monkey by any stretch of the imagination but I imagine some of the actions associated with duping are done client side so I can see how a constant connection to bnet might make duping more difficult.
I see Druhim has entirely stopped reading my posts
I'm really not interested in arguing about this anymore with you
I think it's you that's not reading what Dru is saying. You argue that the game is multiplayer by design while Dru and others are saying "If that is so why is there still single-player mode that simply requires you be online." TF2 is inherently multi-player in that you really can't play it at all alone. That has never been the case with Diablo.
You can play TF2 with bots offline. It's just not the primary mode of play. Obviously, Diablo has more going on for the single player experience, but everything about their design approach seems to hold online play as the focus of the new game. They're not removing the single player component, but they're more than happy to inconvenience offline players as a shortcut to improving the online experience.
Duping and such exists in wow but it's extraordinarily rare for the size of the playerbase and is pretty damn quickly resolved when it happens by Blizzard. It seems logical that the same level of vigilance is going to go into always online Diablo 3.
Well duping is really just a bug that hasn't been fixed. There's no reason why it should exist at all. The point is that if you're offline and you dupe a thousand top end items... it doesn't matter because you can't really do much with them. There's no way to get them onto bnet. If you dupe while playing online... then it really doesn't matter if offline is allowed. So, all you're left with is "we want to monetize your playing" and "cheating in single player is wrong!"
comparing playing TF2 against bots to playing diablo 2 single player is just absurd, and I don't think that's really what annie was arguing
he was simply being clear that there's arguably a way to play TF2 single player, but at the same time it's also very clear it's a very dumbed down experience
that's not true of D2 single player and probably not true of D3 either
Also I really, really doubt that monetizing the playerbase is the reason for online only play. That is not blizzard's MO and never has been.
what? monetizing isn't Blizzard's MO? that's precisely their MO! I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing, but yes they absolutely have and continue to find ways to monetize the player base.
Also I really, really doubt that monetizing the playerbase is the reason for online only play. That is not blizzard's MO and never has been.
what? monetizing isn't Blizzard's MO? that's precisely their MO! I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing, but yes they absolutely have and continue to find ways to monetize the player base.
They want to make money like any other business but a gameplay decision like this is going to happen because they legitimately think it will provide benefits for the playbase, not because they coldly want to increase the bottom line. What I'm saying here is coldly increasing the bottom line has never been Blizzard's primary reason for anything. Especially these days, when they've become a little insane about ensuring their games are fun and continue to be fun.
Nah, Hunter has the right of it. This was a business decision by Blizz, not for the benefit of the playerbase. I mean, sure they want to spin it that way but they absolutely considered estimated lost sales from this decision against additional revenue it would bring in and made the obvious choice.
comparing playing TF2 against bots to playing diablo 2 single player is just absurd, and I don't think that's really what annie was arguing
he was simply being clear that there's arguably a way to play TF2 single player, but at the same time it's also very clear it's a very dumbed down experience
that's not true of D2 single player and probably not true of D3 either
Well, I don't think it's a binary. There's a gradient of how dumbed down either the sp or mp experience is, and it seems like even though Diablo isn't anywhere near TF2, it's sliding that way over time. I took Bale and Pony as being a bit hyperbolic in their arguments, but it seems clear from how they're doing 3 and that blurb about the split player base in 2 that someone quoted earlier how Blizzard feels about it. "You can still do it the old way, but you should have an understanding and certain expectations about your chosen path going forward. These expectations should not be optimistic."
Hunter said it was done for both business and player reasons though, so
and I tend to agree with him. but just from current trends it seems more likely that blizzard's first line of thought was about balance, and the second was about money. more likely, in some departments it was about balance, then in others it was about money.
If Blizzard genuinely expects people to primarily play D3 multiplayer, and is willing to hurt the single player experience in the process, I may actually pass on this. I know many people preferred multiplayer in Borderlands, but I definitely preferred it single player for my own reasons.
Nah, Hunter has the right of it. This was a business decision by Blizz, not for the benefit of the playerbase. I mean, sure they want to spin it that way but they absolutely considered estimated lost sales from this decision against additional revenue it would bring in and made the obvious choice.
It may be to their benefit, but I think also does protect the majority of players given the whole economy structure, its effects on gameplay, and the player base's potential benefit as well. Given that the alternate is paying money directly to Blizzard for space ponies or gambling your real money and possibly your account status on dicey ebay auctions or clandestine negotiations on backwater message boards, this seems like a bit of compromise to multiple parties' benefit.
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Jacques L'HommeBAH! He was a rank amateur compared to, DR. COLOSSUS!Registered Userregular
If Blizzard genuinely expects people to primarily play D3 multiplayer, and is willing to hurt the single player experience in the process, I may actually pass on this. I know many people preferred multiplayer in Borderlands, but I definitely preferred it single player for my own reasons.
A cash market exists for Diablo 2. People get ripped off and scammed all the time. I honestly think Blizzard's cash store is a good idea and they are doing it to protect their players. Sure, they stand to make a profit, but the benefit of a strictly monitored and enforced trade system is going to be an invaluable asset to the community, since it already exits anyway for the previous iteration of the game. Basically, they are adding police to an already existing system. This is not a bad thing.
On the subject of online/offline, I really liked how they did it in Diablo 2 after the 1.10 (or was it 1.11) update. The one where they added a bunch of new online-only runes and rares. Sure, you can play offline in singleplayer mode, but they offered incentives in the form of better items for playing online. And as other people have stated, just because you are playing online doesn't mean you are playing with other people. Just make a locked game room and don't tell anyone the password.
If Blizzard genuinely expects people to primarily play D3 multiplayer, and is willing to hurt the single player experience in the process, I may actually pass on this. I know many people preferred multiplayer in Borderlands, but I definitely preferred it single player for my own reasons.
I get that, and depending on how big of a factor "always online" is for you, it may or may not be this game that breaks the series for you. As it is, though, I can't imagine the core game will change too much. Diablo was always a dungeon crawler. I don't think there's really a complex narrative or deep characterization at risk either way. It seems like ultimately Diablo games are probably at their best with good co-op partners, but otherwise single player is fine.
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
Why does it bother you? They've already stated that there will be a normal in-game gold Auction House, and there will also be standard item trading available. If you don't want to use the cash market, you don't have to. But it is there and available for those who want it.
And as I stated in my earlier post on this page, the cash market already exists for D2. The only difference is, it isn't officially sanctioned and people get ripped off and scammed very regularly. If anything, this is actually a good thing that Blizzard is officially supporting it, because it will cut down on consumer abuse.
Do I intend to use the cash market? Hell no. But I'm glad that Blizzard has taken the responsibility of policing it upon themselves for the people who do wish to partake.
I might actually use my AH moneys to buy WoW pets that are kind of awesome, like the moonkin hatchling.
If I ever resub to WoW, that is.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
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HunterChemist with a heart of AuRegistered Userregular
You are not required to ever use the cash market place.
You don't even need to use the in game gold auction house.
What this does is allow people to buy and trade items without dealing with skeazy ebay sellers or crazy foreign companies that steal money from ignorant people, which I'm sure then bitch at blizzard when their credit card bill comes in the mail and just says "FUCKED" on it.
To do that, and to prevent their intellectual property from being assraped by the small percentage of the intertrons that enjoys ruining fun for the large majority of us, Blizzard introduced this always on DRM. Not because it's the best thing. Not because they couldn't make a way for offline play. They did it because it was most likely the best decision for their business based on money, time, and effort. Welcome to Operational Excellence / Least Waste Way business processes. We're fucking you in the most efficient way possible, but we have no choice because making money is hard.
The complete removal of a single player off-line option for what has historically been a multiplayer focused game (Battle.net launched with Diablo!) is something else entirely, whatever your thoughts might be on how justified it is.
Are they going to be advertising it as having a single player option? If a game does this, I know I personally expect the single player portion to not require being online. Because that is silly.
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HunterChemist with a heart of AuRegistered Userregular
The complete removal of a single player off-line option for what has historically been a multiplayer focused game (Battle.net launched with Diablo!) is something else entirely, whatever your thoughts might be on how justified it is.
Are they going to be advertising it as having a single player option? If a game does this, I know I personally expect the single player portion to not require being online. Because that is silly.
Your personal expectations amount to nothing in the grand scheme of things. I'm not trying to be offensive, I'm just a realistic person.
D3 has single player regardless of needing to be online or not. I can't reiterate that enough. Don't muddle the issue. You can play Diablo 3 with or without other people. What you can't do is play offline.
If playing offline is what you want, and it upsets you that you can't do that, that is a very valid complaint. However, that does not equal no single player.
FWIW, I just canceled my pre-order for a game I was highly anticipating (Driver: San Francisco) when it came out that Ubisoft was using it to experiment with their always-on DRM again. Perhaps I'll buy it later if (when?) Ubisoft backs down with their tail between their legs like they did with Assassin's Creed II. Now in my case such a DRM scheme is actually almost no practical problem at all, since my connection is always on anyway and my internet service is reliable. For me, it's the principle of the thing: it won't work, and they know it won't work, and if they could actually plead ignorance about how consumers would react the first time they sure as hell know people are going to be pissed now, and I see no reason to reward the publisher for that kind of stupidity.
Also I really, really doubt that monetizing the playerbase is the reason for online only play. That is not blizzard's MO and never has been.
what? monetizing isn't Blizzard's MO? that's precisely their MO! I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing, but yes they absolutely have and continue to find ways to monetize the player base.
They want to make money like any other business but a gameplay decision like this is going to happen because they legitimately think it will provide benefits for the playbase, not because they coldly want to increase the bottom line. What I'm saying here is coldly increasing the bottom line has never been Blizzard's primary reason for anything. Especially these days, when they've become a little insane about ensuring their games are fun and continue to be fun.
Double-post ahoy, and no offense, but has this post somehow managed, in defiance of all accepted science, to find its way to us from an alternate universe on the other side of a black hole?
Take Blizzard out of the equation and think of this as being done by Activision if it makes the reality of what's happening here more palatable.
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Goose!That's me, honeyShow me the way home, honeyRegistered Userregular
edited August 2011
I don't think its related to what anyone has said (at least I don't think anyone has made this stance known yet), but what bothers me is people that get mad at game companies for making money beyond selling the game. I have absolutely 0 problem with the real money auction house. If people are willing to spend their money on stuff they can find themselves, why shouldn't the company who made finding that stuff possible benefit?
The reason I say this is because I didn't want to get involved with the stupid back and forth on is Diablo a single or multiplayer game.
I don't think its related to what anyone has said (at least I don't think anyone has made this stance known yet), but what bothers me is people that get mad at game companies for making money beyond selling the game. I have absolutely 0 problem with the real money auction house. If people are willing to spend their money on stuff they can find themselves, why shouldn't the company who made finding that stuff possible benefit?
The reason I say this is because I didn't want to get involved with the stupid back and forth on is Diablo a single or multiplayer game.
Diablo is clearly a game in which you must separate your consciousness from your body and play it in third person on the astral plane.
Posts
I have a damn good always on internet connection but I won't be getting this game. I don't chat with other people, I play solo, I don't trade. It isn't anyone's damn business when and for how long I play a single player game. If the game maker wants my metrics to make the game better I'm happy to help but give me access to the data and the option to upload it manually.
Sometimes I use game mods to "cheat" if I feel like the game system is broken or tedious. I didn't feel like leveling a druid in d2 so I made one with an editor and gave him the best gear. I duped runes to make neat weapons instead of farming them. I started my paladin at level 60 (I think) because I didn't feel like playing through normal and nightmare just to see if the build would work in hell. Why shouldn't I be able to do any of those things? I'm not making the game less fun for anyone else, I'm just PLAYING with the stupid game I bought.
Oh right I know why, because EA can't skim some off the top of my AH purchases if I do that. To all of you who buy this game just imagine Bobby Kotick's face while he is getting a blowjob every time you log in. Because that is what you are paying for.
That picture of that one hairy male cosplaying as Faye is one of them.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
They most likely ran into some logic jam with trying to include offline play and have all the functionality needed for an auction house with protection from the dubious folks that like to dupe and hack.
It seems the decision to keep the auction house won out. It sucks that a percentage of the community that would never and have never duped or haxxed the Gibson and will be inconvenienced due to this. Some might not be able to play at all. That's always a problem. The whole point of making a game is to get people to play it.
I can understand the perspective of both sides of the coin. Blizzard doesn't want their game pirated and they don't won't their community and game balanced butt fucked by those vile denizens of the intertrons that get off on that kind of thing. It's both a cash money business decision and a don't mess with my baby decision. On the other hand, they're penalizing people who want to legitimately pay them for their product and play the game in an offline fashion. Punishing those who want to do something the right way is never a good business practice. I hope there's some middle ground that can be reached without pushing off launch to 2013.
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
hahahahahaha
Except that really isn't an issue. D2 solved this. You have your online character, managed by Blizzard's servers and then you have your offline characters you can mess around with all you want. You can't import any offline generated data onto bnet anyway and if people are hacking the client to create items while on bnet, they're still going to do it
Wait, are you saying that Civ has a more compelling single player experience than Diablo? What?
I agree with you in some respects here bale but uh
This is like saying that Baldurs Gate is best played in mutliplayer cos it has to give you NPCs if you're alone
I think it's you that's not reading what Dru is saying. You argue that the game is multiplayer by design while Dru and others are saying "If that is so why is there still single-player mode that simply requires you be online." TF2 is inherently multi-player in that you really can't play it at all alone. That has never been the case with Diablo.
I'm not a code monkey by any stretch of the imagination but I imagine some of the actions associated with duping are done client side so I can see how a constant connection to bnet might make duping more difficult.
Diablo is a co-op game, so the gameplay is there regardless of if you have 2, 4, or 1 person.
That docent mean it was predominantly designed with multiplayer in mind.
But people can be mad if they wanna be mad.
he was simply being clear that there's arguably a way to play TF2 single player, but at the same time it's also very clear it's a very dumbed down experience
that's not true of D2 single player and probably not true of D3 either
what? monetizing isn't Blizzard's MO? that's precisely their MO! I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing, but yes they absolutely have and continue to find ways to monetize the player base.
They want to make money like any other business but a gameplay decision like this is going to happen because they legitimately think it will provide benefits for the playbase, not because they coldly want to increase the bottom line. What I'm saying here is coldly increasing the bottom line has never been Blizzard's primary reason for anything. Especially these days, when they've become a little insane about ensuring their games are fun and continue to be fun.
Well, I don't think it's a binary. There's a gradient of how dumbed down either the sp or mp experience is, and it seems like even though Diablo isn't anywhere near TF2, it's sliding that way over time. I took Bale and Pony as being a bit hyperbolic in their arguments, but it seems clear from how they're doing 3 and that blurb about the split player base in 2 that someone quoted earlier how Blizzard feels about it. "You can still do it the old way, but you should have an understanding and certain expectations about your chosen path going forward. These expectations should not be optimistic."
and I tend to agree with him. but just from current trends it seems more likely that blizzard's first line of thought was about balance, and the second was about money. more likely, in some departments it was about balance, then in others it was about money.
You could say it's their MMO.
It may be to their benefit, but I think also does protect the majority of players given the whole economy structure, its effects on gameplay, and the player base's potential benefit as well. Given that the alternate is paying money directly to Blizzard for space ponies or gambling your real money and possibly your account status on dicey ebay auctions or clandestine negotiations on backwater message boards, this seems like a bit of compromise to multiple parties' benefit.
This.
Misanthropes like games too.
It doesn't mean you are "wrong" to play it by yourself, but it seems clear that most design choices are going to be made with the co-op in mind.
playing those games by yourself will gimp your experience a lot less than playing say, L4D by yourself
But I see all 3 of those games in the same vein
On the subject of online/offline, I really liked how they did it in Diablo 2 after the 1.10 (or was it 1.11) update. The one where they added a bunch of new online-only runes and rares. Sure, you can play offline in singleplayer mode, but they offered incentives in the form of better items for playing online. And as other people have stated, just because you are playing online doesn't mean you are playing with other people. Just make a locked game room and don't tell anyone the password.
especially when I've already payed for the game
I don't understand. Are you talking about the entirely optional cash AH in D3 that you can completely ignore and not use?
Why does it bother you? They've already stated that there will be a normal in-game gold Auction House, and there will also be standard item trading available. If you don't want to use the cash market, you don't have to. But it is there and available for those who want it.
And as I stated in my earlier post on this page, the cash market already exists for D2. The only difference is, it isn't officially sanctioned and people get ripped off and scammed very regularly. If anything, this is actually a good thing that Blizzard is officially supporting it, because it will cut down on consumer abuse.
Do I intend to use the cash market? Hell no. But I'm glad that Blizzard has taken the responsibility of policing it upon themselves for the people who do wish to partake.
If I ever resub to WoW, that is.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
You are not required to ever use the cash market place.
You don't even need to use the in game gold auction house.
What this does is allow people to buy and trade items without dealing with skeazy ebay sellers or crazy foreign companies that steal money from ignorant people, which I'm sure then bitch at blizzard when their credit card bill comes in the mail and just says "FUCKED" on it.
To do that, and to prevent their intellectual property from being assraped by the small percentage of the intertrons that enjoys ruining fun for the large majority of us, Blizzard introduced this always on DRM. Not because it's the best thing. Not because they couldn't make a way for offline play. They did it because it was most likely the best decision for their business based on money, time, and effort. Welcome to Operational Excellence / Least Waste Way business processes. We're fucking you in the most efficient way possible, but we have no choice because making money is hard.
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
Are they going to be advertising it as having a single player option? If a game does this, I know I personally expect the single player portion to not require being online. Because that is silly.
Your personal expectations amount to nothing in the grand scheme of things. I'm not trying to be offensive, I'm just a realistic person.
D3 has single player regardless of needing to be online or not. I can't reiterate that enough. Don't muddle the issue. You can play Diablo 3 with or without other people. What you can't do is play offline.
If playing offline is what you want, and it upsets you that you can't do that, that is a very valid complaint. However, that does not equal no single player.
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
Double-post ahoy, and no offense, but has this post somehow managed, in defiance of all accepted science, to find its way to us from an alternate universe on the other side of a black hole?
Take Blizzard out of the equation and think of this as being done by Activision if it makes the reality of what's happening here more palatable.
The reason I say this is because I didn't want to get involved with the stupid back and forth on is Diablo a single or multiplayer game.
Diablo is clearly a game in which you must separate your consciousness from your body and play it in third person on the astral plane.
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist