You can still play Diablo, a 15+ year old game, online on the official servers.
You're missing the point. The point is that Prince of Persia still runs fine despite Ubi Soft servers having gone tits up a while ago. The point is that if, say, Blizzard went completely bankrupt tomorrow and shut their doors forever, Diablo 1 and 2 would still be perfectly playable in singleplayer and LAN modes. Diablo 3? COMPLETELY WORTHLESS.
This is actually an interesting phenomenon of the digital era. At no time in the past could you purchase something and then be mad when it didn't work perfectly 10, 20, 50 years in the future.
Only digital goods seem to be immune to entropy. Once purchased, they are expected to last for eternity. Which sort of makes sense. I mean scarcity doesn't apply naturally either. It has to be imposed artificially.
It's an interesting concept though.
Ehhhh. There are musical instruments that have lasted hundreds of years. They work even better than modern instruments, which is one of the reasons professional musicians continue to play them. A lot of paintings have lasted a long time, too. And I expect the car I bought in 2007 to last until 2017. Different items run on different time scales of usefulness.
Ok, so there are a certain class of items that are meticulously maintained so that they last. People are putting a lot of resources into storing (and restoring) those items though. At that point, it's not just <some thing I bought for a particular purpose>. It's an investment.
I suspect that Taaarkoth wants it to "just work" like I expect any old thing I pick up from WalMart to just work, and he wants it to stay that way for the foreseeable future with no additional input of resources on his part. That's the part that seems unique to digital goods.
You know, because of this thread, I found out that you can still play Adventure - Now that's shelf life!
"excuse my French
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
0
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
They are going to make a metric fuckton on the Auction House when that gets up and running. The amount that makes will make a fuckton look incredibly small by comparison, let alone the distance it will put between itself and a shitton.
Edit: Also, in buying the game they are also setting you up for purchasing an expansion pack. At least one of those is all but guaranteed.
Thank you Rehab for stepping in, I knew someone was going to eventually.
Now then, real money auction house vs. the in-game auction house. Obviously we haven't seen them compete, so will the former end up being "required" to getting certain kinds of objects / items? Who knows.
But again, I point back to what I've said already - optional fees are optional, you don't have to spend money to progress. In fact, when you pit the Real Money AH against freemium MMOs, it's a fucking joke in terms of making the argument that you have to pay to succeed. Like hell you do! It's the most player-friendly thing to happen. In that players have a free version that has all the same benefits anyway.
The point is that the RMAH is most likely the primary reason they went with the always online model. If you feel that is the most likely truth, which I certainly do, then this whole thing comes across as them making things worse for people who want to play single player, specifically to profit off of the RMAH.
Basically, we have to put up with shitty DRM so they can leech as much profit off the player base as they can. Why can't I play by myself when the server is down or my Internet is acting up? Why do I get fucking LAG when I'm playing single player? Because they value additional profit over giving me the best game experience possible.
Good for them on figuring out a way to make more money, I guess. But for a good chunk of people, the advantages of always online do not cover up the disadvantages. I will never be able to play Diablo III without the threat of lag spikes getting me killed. That sucks.
It's one thing to say that the RMAH is a reason of the always-on DRM.
It's a totally different thing to say it's the only reason for it. We've all discussed, time and time again, the other benefits we get from this or other reasons Blizzard possibly had. And again, given how the RMAH operates in the details, Blizzard taking a cut of a function a lot of people aren't interested in using and can't use for hardcore characters isn't raking money in hand over fist.
0
Lord_SnotЖиву за выходныеAmerican ValhallaRegistered Userregular
Just my two cents, I played the Starter Edition and it's a solid enough game. I've never had any attachment to the Diablo franchise, as much as I like hack and slash games. I've decided against purchasing on the fact that it lacks spark for me (that's a personal thing though, I appreciate that lots of people love the Diablo franchise, or at least Diablo 3) and the always-online DRM.
While I dislike the idea a lot, I could tolerate it were it not for one thing, the lag in singleplayer. I have a fairly slow internet connection, and I hate having lag in a singleplayer game. That's the only reason I dislike it, but that's enough to put me off purchasing it to see if it gets better after Act 1.
Just my two cents, I played the Starter Edition and it's a solid enough game. I've never had any attachment to the Diablo franchise, as much as I like hack and slash games. I've decided against purchasing on the fact that it lacks spark for me (that's a personal thing though, I appreciate that lots of people love the Diablo franchise, or at least Diablo 3) and the always-online DRM.
While I dislike the idea a lot, I could tolerate it were it not for one thing, the lag in singleplayer. I have a fairly slow internet connection, and I hate having lag in a singleplayer game. That's the only reason I dislike it, but that's enough to put me off purchasing it to see if it gets better after Act 1.
That's a completely valid reason. In fact my guess is that the only reason they've got those Starter Editions locked to codes is to limit the amount of people demoing the game. I'm betting in the future they'll make the Starter Edition free to everyone so they can entice people like you who have bad internet connections and don't want to buy it if they can't play it comfortably.
No MMO that's shut down their servers has offered any official dedicated server download to let people outside the company run their own servers and even if they had I doubt any would offer a full character data download service in tandem.
Terra: Battle for the Outland is an MMO that the original company eventually licensed out to the community to run. It was a long, complicated process though, and i don't know if it included user data.
I suspect that Taaarkoth wants it to "just work" like I expect any old thing I pick up from WalMart to just work, and he wants it to stay that way for the foreseeable future with no additional input of resources on his part. That's the part that seems unique to digital goods.
Perhaps it's not the same, but prior to the digital world, certain intellectual property has continued to exist for thousands of years, due to replication. Books have existed and have been replicated for thousands of years. Musical scores the same, while musical recordings have been replicated for the past century or so. Same with films.
What's more, all of these had the ability to be replicated long after they fell into public domain. When the Bram Stoker estate sued F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu for copyright infringement and won, they ordered all existing copies destroyed. However, a few survived in the hands of private collectors, and once Dracula fell into the public domain, this derivative work could be distributed freely. If the film had been locked behind some sort of DRM, it's possible that the film could've been effectively destroyed, removing the work from the public forever.
Video games experience their own sort of entropy due to being created to work on specific hardware. Emulators help with this for older titles, but newer hardware is getting so complex that it may take much longer to make effective emulators of them. But at least they work for as long as the hardware lasts. I can still buy a working Atari system and play games on it. If that one breaks, I can buy another original system, albeit from an ever diminishing supply. Eventually, the patents on the hardware lapse, allowing clones to be made, if anyone wants to. Copies of the games may be harder to come by though, especially if they're locked by DRM to old, expired hardware.
With video games that rely on server-side content, you're at the whim of the company running the server. The servers don't even have to fail; the company simply decides it's not worth running them anymore. There's no other place to turn to for a working server. It's not necessarily a case of the product working for a set period of years, be it 5, 10, or 100 years. It's the idea that the entire game, of which potentially millions of people bought copies of, is at the mercy of one entity. The game doesn't really have a chance of ever entering public domain, since the company isn't ever compelled to release the server code (public domain just means that they can't restrict copying of their material anymore, it doesn't mean they have to provide a copy to anyone).
The digital era does allow for easy byte-to-byte exact copies of material, which has got copyright holders scared to death. However, by making their IP tied to DRM or proprietary servers, they're adding an entropy to it that they hope to control. The side effect though, is that there are games developed in the past 10 years that are unplayable, while as others have pointed out, people can still play the original Adventure from 30 years ago. These games don't last anywhere near as long as content that previously required a person to copy it down, word for word, by hand.
The always-online DRM requirement for Diablo 3 resulted in a lost sale for Blizzard from me. I put a stupid number of hours into Diablo 2 along with a buddy, and we were looking forward to doing the same for this game. The problem is, I frequently work in areas where I don't have access to the internet, or a stable internet connection and I like to do a lot of my single player gaming in the evenings when doing the remote work. Also, since I can't get through the single player part of the game in a reasonable amount of time due to the DRM preventing me from doing it while working remotely, my buddy and I will probably play something else that doesn't require as heavy a time investment. Ironically, if the game was more moddable, we could probably have created some higher level characters to allow for group play-throughs/games despite the fact that I wouldn't have the time to level a character up, but the no-mods, online only nature of the game prevents this solution.
0
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
The always-online DRM requirement for Diablo 3 resulted in a lost sale for Blizzard from me. I put a stupid number of hours into Diablo 2 along with a buddy, and we were looking forward to doing the same for this game. The problem is, I frequently work in areas where I don't have access to the internet, or a stable internet connection and I like to do a lot of my single player gaming in the evenings when doing the remote work. Also, since I can't get through the single player part of the game in a reasonable amount of time due to the DRM preventing me from doing it while working remotely, my buddy and I will probably play something else that doesn't require as heavy a time investment. Ironically, if the game was more moddable, we could probably have created some higher level characters to allow for group play-throughs/games despite the fact that I wouldn't have the time to level a character up, but the no-mods, online only nature of the game prevents this solution.
Have you considered using mobile broadband? I don't recommend this as a Diablo 3 solution or a permanent internet solution - it's made to be on the go, like you apparently are.
Edit - And your latency with it will be as good as the connection. It's not like satellite where it's automatically over 1k ping rates all the time. :P
I work in Canada, and most of the places I do fieldwork are small towns with little or no cellular phone service, or in camps in remote regions where the internet is only sufficient for the office work, while the general camp internet is highly degraded and heavily shared such that you can only send the occassional email (when it works). Believe me, I'd love to be able to have more reliable internet no matter where I go, but I haven't been able to find anything decent that is also affordable.
Posts
You know, because of this thread, I found out that you can still play Adventure - Now that's shelf life!
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
It's one thing to say that the RMAH is a reason of the always-on DRM.
It's a totally different thing to say it's the only reason for it. We've all discussed, time and time again, the other benefits we get from this or other reasons Blizzard possibly had. And again, given how the RMAH operates in the details, Blizzard taking a cut of a function a lot of people aren't interested in using and can't use for hardcore characters isn't raking money in hand over fist.
While I dislike the idea a lot, I could tolerate it were it not for one thing, the lag in singleplayer. I have a fairly slow internet connection, and I hate having lag in a singleplayer game. That's the only reason I dislike it, but that's enough to put me off purchasing it to see if it gets better after Act 1.
Blog
Twitter
Terra: Battle for the Outland is an MMO that the original company eventually licensed out to the community to run. It was a long, complicated process though, and i don't know if it included user data.
http://www.terracro.com/origin-terra-online.html
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,8243897
It may be the exception, or one of only a few exceptions, though. Typically MMOs do just shut down, the game and all user data lost.
Perhaps it's not the same, but prior to the digital world, certain intellectual property has continued to exist for thousands of years, due to replication. Books have existed and have been replicated for thousands of years. Musical scores the same, while musical recordings have been replicated for the past century or so. Same with films.
What's more, all of these had the ability to be replicated long after they fell into public domain. When the Bram Stoker estate sued F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu for copyright infringement and won, they ordered all existing copies destroyed. However, a few survived in the hands of private collectors, and once Dracula fell into the public domain, this derivative work could be distributed freely. If the film had been locked behind some sort of DRM, it's possible that the film could've been effectively destroyed, removing the work from the public forever.
Video games experience their own sort of entropy due to being created to work on specific hardware. Emulators help with this for older titles, but newer hardware is getting so complex that it may take much longer to make effective emulators of them. But at least they work for as long as the hardware lasts. I can still buy a working Atari system and play games on it. If that one breaks, I can buy another original system, albeit from an ever diminishing supply. Eventually, the patents on the hardware lapse, allowing clones to be made, if anyone wants to. Copies of the games may be harder to come by though, especially if they're locked by DRM to old, expired hardware.
With video games that rely on server-side content, you're at the whim of the company running the server. The servers don't even have to fail; the company simply decides it's not worth running them anymore. There's no other place to turn to for a working server. It's not necessarily a case of the product working for a set period of years, be it 5, 10, or 100 years. It's the idea that the entire game, of which potentially millions of people bought copies of, is at the mercy of one entity. The game doesn't really have a chance of ever entering public domain, since the company isn't ever compelled to release the server code (public domain just means that they can't restrict copying of their material anymore, it doesn't mean they have to provide a copy to anyone).
The digital era does allow for easy byte-to-byte exact copies of material, which has got copyright holders scared to death. However, by making their IP tied to DRM or proprietary servers, they're adding an entropy to it that they hope to control. The side effect though, is that there are games developed in the past 10 years that are unplayable, while as others have pointed out, people can still play the original Adventure from 30 years ago. These games don't last anywhere near as long as content that previously required a person to copy it down, word for word, by hand.
Same here, but you can't deny that Adventure has historical importance.
Have you considered using mobile broadband? I don't recommend this as a Diablo 3 solution or a permanent internet solution - it's made to be on the go, like you apparently are.
Edit - And your latency with it will be as good as the connection. It's not like satellite where it's automatically over 1k ping rates all the time. :P