Somehow I am not surprised

[justwannaddl]

Actually more to do with money, this introduced this entire system because they expect D3 to attract their wow players, and as D3 is a pay once game they needed a way to get constant revenue, so they introduced the new auction house so they can get their cut of the item farming and trades :P so more than anything, its greed.

 

Agreed on that but I can't help but shake the feeling that this is also a social experiment on their part. If the game doesn't have the same longevity as its predecessors then profits from the AH and even game sales alone may not cover the long term costs for maintaining servers to host every game. The major benefit of always online DRM is that it essential changes the game from a product into a service that they can potentially change, monitor and even discontinue at their discretion.

 

Players do not own the game. They just have access to it. If they violate the terms of said access, they can be banned. Account activity such as play time, characters used, players killed, amount of real money players are willing to spend in the AH, etc can be aggregated and used to target the customer base with commercials, email campaigns, exclusive in game perks, etc. Should they succeed, Blizz/Activision could even tack on a subscription fee to future single player games, thus tapping into the used game and renter's markets.

 

Of course all this means that modding is pretty much out of the question, players with poor internet connectivity are screwed and privacy is forfeit.

Edited May 18, 2012 by justwannaddl

[hector530]

Actually more to do with money, this introduced this entire system because they expect D3 to attract their wow players, and as D3 is a pay once game they needed a way to get constant revenue, so they introduced the new auction house so they can get their cut of the item farming and trades :P so more than anything, its greed.

 

yeah like i said its about cheating, if you can just use stuff like cheat engine and give yourself 999999999 gold then the AH becomes worthless

[marharth]

Why not make it so you have separate accounts for online and singleplayer?

[justwannaddl]

Why not make it so you have separate accounts for online and singleplayer?

 

They wanted to push players to use the Auction House, collect usage data from players and prevent modding. No point in grinding the infinity +1 sword if a modder can easily make one that has better textures and animations. No modders mean they have no competition for DLCs like Christmas outfits and pet cow followers. The excuse to have always online DRM doesn't hurt either.

Edited May 18, 2012 by justwannaddl

[hoofhearted4]

wait. was Diablo 2 moddable?.....legally. like Blizzard allowed it?

[justwannaddl]

wait. was Diablo 2 moddable?.....legally. like Blizzard allowed it?

 

Bethesda games aren't the only games with mods. Is it legal? Yes it is. Allowed on battlenet? No. Never. Blizzard would kill your family and burn your house down before they'd allow it. They weren't too keen about people using item dupe exploits either though they never quite got a handle on the latter. That didn't stop people who played it for single player and in LAN parties.

 

On a related note, I found a nice article by John Cheese on the Diablo launch.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-diablo-iii-represents-gamings-annoying-future/

Edited May 18, 2012 by justwannaddl

[Yoshh]

yeah like i said its about cheating, if you can just use stuff like cheat engine and give yourself 999999999 gold then the AH becomes worthless

 

I highly doubt that'd happen. Given that the game needs a constant connection to the servers, would be logical that they would have some sort of way to know if the game is being tampered with, thus banning your account.

[hector530]

you cant, everything happens on bnets servers

[Illiad86]

wait. was Diablo 2 moddable?.....legally. like Blizzard allowed it?

 

Yep, check out Planet Diablo, there's a few mods for the game on there. Plus, they had the good old Hero Editor where you could give your character anything. You could use them on bnet but only on Open Battle.net. I've never seen a single person on the regular servers with an edited character in the 6+ years I've been playing.

 

I will give Blizzard that, they were good at making sure hackers didn't get in the game. Dupers on the other hand...ugh. There was a bad string of duped SOJs and the higher level high runes a few ladder seasons ago. Bad time to be playing...I lost two Jahs and a Zod rune from that crap :(

 

I'm not too surprised that this game was going to blow chunks, but still...ugh. Glad I can go spend $60 on something else :P

Edited May 18, 2012 by Illiad86

[Halororor]

What I don't get is that they could just as easily have used an offline system to detect hacks and cheats.

 

What I think is that they want it online because then their servers determine what gets dropped, where and how many. That way, they have a fair amount of control over the economy, as well as a certain modicum of control over the prices of certain items.