In the old days, before your time, there was a company called Blizzard. Yes yes, I know, they’re still around today, but they’re not the same Blizzard. Back then, when they made a game, you sat up and took notice. Back then when they made an expansion, it added a great deal of content.
I remember it clearly. I had just awoken, the sleep barely rubbed from my eyes, when Pike came with grim news. Blizzard. Diablo III. I thought perhaps that they had bowed to the silliness about “too much color”, and made it all brown’n’bloom. But no. Diablo III, I learned to my endless horror, would be subject to the following;
1) There would be no offline play. You must be connected to b.net to play the game.
I saw this and I was mad. It is monumentally stupid. It encourages piracy rather than reducing it. It has consistently proven to be a poor idea when previously implemented.
2) There will be an auction house where you can use real money to purchase in-game characters and items from other players.
I saw this and I was leery. I can understand Blizz’s desire to undermine gold farming and so forth, and legitimizing something we all know already happens anyway is not such a huge deal. Still, it seems dreadfully crass and overwhelmingly all-encompassing in this instance. I just don’t want to log into a game, play for awhile, decide to look for an item, and be presented with real-world prices. I’ve enough money woes as is without my escape being filled with constant reminders of it too. Still, I play single player for the most part, and this doesn’t provide anything that some grinding and luck won’t get you anyway – it’s optional, and I can tolerate it despite the bad taste it leaves.
(Though given that Diablo is essentially Grinding for Gear: The Game, my solution would have simply been to make players unable to trade anything except to people in their group at the time the item dropped. I imagine this would have caused plenty of rage too though.)
3) No mods allowed.
Now let me be quite clear about this. This doesn’t mean Blizzard won’t be supportive of modders or include any tools that make life easier for them. What they mean, in fact, is that the EULA will specifically forbid them. They are not merely not officially supported, they are avowedly not permitted. And because you have to be online to play, even if someone makes a mod, you’re likely going to have to do something like download a crack in order to actually use it. Suffice it to say, this is a truly mindboggling step to take from the company’s whose modded games have spawned such things as DOTA and Median XL. I have waxed lyrical about the virtues of mods previously, and I really cannot quite wrap my head around who at Blizzard thought this was a good idea, why anyone agreed with them, and why the nice gentlemen with the wood-paneled station wagons have not yet carted the whole shower of them off to get the help they so patently require.
In short, I cancelled any notions I had to ever purchase D3. Which is a damned shame, because I loved the first two, and I love most of Blizz’s games, and I actually anticipate that if I did play it, I’d enjoy it immensely. But I simply cannot sanction this sort of nonsense with my patronage.
The only one that really bothers me is the “online only”. It just doesn’t make any sense. While fun to join friends and all, it doesn’t mean I’ll always want to. Or be logged on. That said, it’s not really a deal-breaker for me. I play WoW. I’m on B.Net all the damn time anyway. :)
The real-world currency thing doesn’t bother me simply for the fact that it’s not Blizzard selling these items. Hell, we already have people selling stuff on eBay. The only difference being now is that Blizz facilitates the transaction and that it can be some game-advantage stuff. As you said, it’s optional. While money may be an issue for you, you can grind for that gear. While, on the other hand, time to grind is an issue for others. Basically, money can get the same gameplay for people who don’t have the time and vice versa. Only the people without the time or money suffer…who would have suffered even without the real-currency AH.
But essentially the ‘always-online’ and ‘no-mod’ features (for want of a better word) are inescapable consequents of their RMT auction house.
When people can exchange real life dollars/euros/pounds sterling for items, you can’t have mods that affect drop rate and you can’t store anything client side or someone will hack it.
I’m not saying the AH is a bad or a good thing, but it is almost certainly behind these other decisions.
Okay. The online only stuff does make sense now. :)
I had realized that they were linked for this reason a short while after I made the post. The point is well-made, and quite rapidly takes my position on the RMT from “Eh I guess it happens” to “Nope.”
MMOs might be a suitable place for this. D3 is not.
I disagree. D2 had battle.net characters which could be played only online, and single-player characters which could only be played single-player. D1 did something rather like that, too.
They COULD have allowed single-player or LAN without making everything b-net only, but they didn’t. I’m personally someone who has never appreciated b-net D2, but have played a lot of single-player, so this D3 development pisses me off. Will it make hacking perhaps a bit easier? Maybe, but the hacking will happen anyhow and this attempt to prevent it is like taking a shot of Malaria to stop a cold.
I dunno, I’m ok with no mods as long as the game doesn’t require them.
I think it’s stupid that they’re not even going to allow UI enhancing mods (as I’ve never met a default UI I’ve really liked), and also DOTA, but if the game is malleable without mods, I’m generally ok with it.
That said, RMT is likely behind these issues, as Chris said.
I dunno. Still think it’s dumb, and I’d much prefer microtransactions to RMT. Alternatively, if Blizzard were to take a 50% cut of the RMT AH…
To my regret I think there goes any chance of me buying DIII as well. Up to now I have been looking at the various snippets of news and making the assumption that DIII was going to be a vastly improved version of DII where one could learn skills and test characters in solo play before one chose to launch into the world of Battlenet. I was even naive to think that I could just play solo games forever should I chose to do so. I loved DII, I was fully prepared to love DIII but I already have one online only game I choose to play and that’s WoW. I guess that’s it for Blizzard then. They have ceased to be a gaming house and have become instead a studio.
Interesting comment I find on RPS.
“I’ve been raging about the things mentioned above already in other forums, but the truth is, it gets worse. Even the gameplay information released is bad. They’ve made it so by the time you’ve finished normal, you have every trait and skill in the game. You can hot swap, for free, between any of them, picking six skills and three passive traits at any time. Your character has no permanent theme, and there is never any reason to play a class a second time (unless, I suppose, you sold your old one on their immensely stupid auction house). And without skill or talent points, that means that you will not advance at all beyond automatic stat leveling and gear after normal.
EDIT: A link to my source: http://www.diablofans.com/topic/26249-diablo-3-press-event-visit/ “
Here’s another thought – games like Diablo have always had an element of item trading to them. No-one seems to object to this.
As fans of Civ-style games (!) we can presumably all understand the idea of a system evolving over time. The logical progression from a bartering system is progressing to trading over time using a third commodity, i.e. if you have X and want Y, but don’t want Y now, you can trade X for, say 500Z and then use 500Z to buy Y later.
In this case Z happens to be $/E/£ and this is the same currency used to buy the game in the first place, which muddies the waters somewhat. The other complicating factor is that $/E/£ is also used in another game, that called real life.
Anyway, I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, and I’m not 100% decided on where my opinion on the whole thing lies, but it’s good to play devil’s advocate sometimes.*
Interesting to see that some people (elsewhere) are screaming very loudly about cheating through purchasing items, but have no qualms about rushing other characters through the levels and showering them with high end items, etc. In fact, on most D2 fan boards there are adverts for people looking to be both rushers and rushees.
I think this is a lot more complex than it first seems.
Anyway, wall of text crits you for 100,000 TLDR damage and you die.
* Diablo III: Devil’s advocate, long awaited expansion pack to the reasonably selling DIII. Released 2032, retails at £1000 + your first born son.
I can guarantee that Chinese farmers will find a way to exploit the system for their own benefit- I can think of a few ways off the top of my head- and in a situation where it is open and already done so in game then there will be significantly less thing Blizz can do about it.
IMO, the best thing that could be done to make sure that people wouldn’t use such tactics is perma bans, sure you lose some people, but eventually every one else just adapts and the gaming environment grows because the game is actually being played like how it was intended. Essentially how Corporal punishment as a deterrent is supposed to function- the reason corporal punishment doesn’t work well in real life in every situation is even death is not a deterrent for certain crimes such as crimes of passion, or ones that they truly believe they can get away without being found out.
Yes, it is harsh, but it is the harshness that would teach others to not even dare to violate the agreed rules of the game.
Only #1 is a bit irritating, but since my internet at home is a wireless network, I’m not too worried about not being online.
The RMT auction house irritated me a lot at first, but when I got over my initial nerd rage, the more it made sense to me. It’s basically a way for Blizz to attempt to curb the item selling that was (and still is) going on in Diablo II from the third party websites, many of which result in compromised accounts. This type of thing would never work in an MMO like WoW primarily because of the competitive element of both PvE (world first races) and PvP (gaming league tourneys). Being able to buy an advantage over the other players in these elements would only put those who have plenty of disposable income ahead and this would completely destroy the spirit of an MMO game.
Diablo can be played entirely solo with absolutely zero interaction with other players if you so choose. You may not solo everything on Nightmare difficulty but you can play through the game and get the gear solo. You don’t really have that option in an MMO. If you want to run a dungeon you need four other people. If you want to raid you need 9/24.
Nothing’s perfect and every system out there can be abused in some way. The most anyone can do is have measures in place to lessen the impact of abuse. I don’t plan on using the RMT AH (you can still sell the items for regular in-game gold) but the prospect of being able to make back the $60 I spent on the game is an interesting prospect.
The exact same “logic” behind not allowing spawn games with Starcraft 2, one of the things that made Starcraft so popular in the first place.
I haven’t followed the corporate, behind the games history of Blizzard, but ever since they got bought out, they’ve been pulling more and more things like this…things that sacrifice the fun aspects of the game for more corporate control.
Why no single player mode? Just segregate single player characters from B.net and there you have your solution to hacked characters flooding the market with hacked items.
Why no mods? WoW has mods, some are banned and some are not, and nobody has any trouble with this because all the loot drop rates are controlled server side.
And real life money? Yeah, that’ll stop the gold farmers all right…they’ll force their “employees” to farm items, and then they’ll sell the farmed items on Blizzard’s own auction house! The only thing this will do is eliminate their website overhead costs! You think one guy with Auctioneer can screw up prices on WoW’s AH? How about a whole colony of gold farmers getting paid to do it?!
TLDR: As Blizzard becomes more corporate, it becomes more and more willing to sacrifice fun for bottom-line padding control measures.
I like everything you say, and sanction it wholly.