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Comment by kaonashi | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's to do with it. If it had a traditional single-player architecture, there would be no issues at all.

You're failing to draw a distinction between always-on DRM and multiplayer server capacity. Look at what you just said:

> Of course it's to do with [DRM]. If it [was a single player game], there would be no issues at all.

The two are unrelated. If it was a single player game we wouldn't be having these issues... because it wouldn't need server capacity to play, which is nothing to do with DRM. It could still have always-on DRM.

Could you play single player games while they were having server issues?

Fact is that DRM is the real reason why the game is heavily multiplayer. Older versions were always single player and there is no reason they couldn't at least have implemented this mode in the new game other than having an excuse to put some of the logic on a server to thwart piracy. And that is what is causing the current problems.

> Fact is that DRM is the real reason why the game is heavily multiplayer

Perhaps. I had be interested in your sources for this fact though. Otherwise it feels like opinion being stated as fact.

> If it was a single player game we wouldn't be having these issues... because it wouldn't need server capacity to play, which is nothing to do with DRM. It could still have always-on DRM.

Well, if the players still had to be connected to the servers (always-on) to play, maybe the same problems would arise even though the players wouldn't be interacting.

The strange aspect of this is that their infrastructure seems to be static. In this modern age of cloud computing, why not make the number of game servers elastic? That would bring safety to them and savings by reducing the number of idling servers when demand is low.

Are you suggesting it has to do with the technical implications of always-on DRM or the ethical considerations?

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