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Comment by bicknergseng | Hacker News Reader

Warning: somewhat unrelated and probably a rant:

Can I just say that Blizzard's handling of the Diablo 3 launch was a travesty on so many levels? First of all, nothing worked. No one could login to play, despite their stress testing beta and having a large percentage of players sign up and predownload far before launch. Their response was the now internet famous "Error 37," an absolutely useless message for users. If everything was going to be completely broken, they could have at least provided a useful error message saying "We're getting more traffic than anticipated and will notify you when the servers are ready." or something.

Seriously one of the most disappointing end user experiences I have ever had, and there's no way for me to return my $60 download.

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Really? Your is a common complaint, so perhaps I'm just weird, but I was neither surprised nor upset by the opening day crunch. It was certainly nothing compared to, for example, WoW's release day. Or some of Steam's releases, back in the day.

With D3, I logged in on release day, got the error a few times. Came back a couple hours later, and managed to log in. Played around a bit, had a good time. There were some occasional lag spikes, but nothing catastrophic. The next day, I had no problems with logging in at all (only a very occasional lag spike). All days since have been smooth sailing.

It was one day. Get over it. The game has worked very well since.

Not totally well. I still get lag spikes in a _single player game_. It's really confusing to me why they make the client rely on the server, especially when I've turned off "quick join" mode.

Diablo 3 isn't a single player game with an online component, it is an online game you can choose to play solo.

I agree with this choice, especially with games like Diablo. Yes there are that subset of players who will only play through the campaign alone and never touch it again but the majority are going to play on battlenet and there would be no reason to even play offline.

That's just not true. most people who buy Starcraft 2, for example, only use it to play the single player mode, even thought SC2 is even closer to a pure multiplayer game than Diablo.

Forcing you to be online at all times leads to terrible user experience (it is strictly worse than just disabling some features when you lose the connection like SC2 does), so I believe Blizzard is purely motivated by DRM in this matter.

Blizzard is motivated by protecting the online economy, and keeping complexity and user confusion down.

They tried allowing local machine play before, but it resulted in a few problems:

- If they allowed you to play your solo player in groups, it opened the floodgates for hacked items and gold.

- If they forbade you from playing your solo player in groups, it caused massive consumer confusion and anger because you couldn't play your character, whom you'd built up over weeks, with your friends.

If you simply store all character info server-side and keep it there, you solve both problems: No more direct hacking of the data, and no more confused users. The cost is that users can't play the game offline, but that's a less serious problem than the other two.

I disagree. Whatever you have to say about the hacked stuff in Diablo 2, it didn't really make the game much less fun, neither for people hacking it nor for people playing it straight.

The problem they're solving isn't a problem that players have. It's that they want to make money off Diablo microtransactions, and they think they can't do that in the presence of hacked characters and items.

Actually, it did make the game less fun. Same for Borderlands.

With hacked items, there was no point in playing a public game, because chances were high that one or more players had hacked items which allowed them to kill enemies in one shot, or made them virtually indestructible, thus trivializing the game. The end result was that you'd only risk playing with close friends, unless you finally gave in and used hacked items yourself just so you'd have a chance when playing with others.

Also, as rare items become as common as sand due to hacking, the marketplaces are ruined, since hacked "super rare" items depress prices to the point that it's only worthwhile to sell in bulk, which is only possible if you hack. It also causes bleed over into my previous point, as regular non-hacking users acquire hacked items via the marketplace without necessarily realizing it, and the game is further trivialized, with everyone decked out in super rares that they bought for 1000 gold each. Now you must choose between a trivial game, and a "legit" game where everyone else runs circles around you because your gear is crappy by comparison.

No. Blizzard made the right choice here, and I for one applaud their decision.

Blizzard said something about trying to avoid confusion, but I don't think anyone was actually confused about their inability to play solo characters on BNet in D2.

I played D2 with a number of non-technical people, and it took quite a bit of explaining before they finally understood why they couldn't play their solo characters online. Their usual response at the end was "well, that's stupid."

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