Evening, Mr. Malstrom,
Long time reader, first time mailer. I was one of the many people playing Diablo 2 when it came out, played it online, offline, with friends, and without. I probably played it more than I should have, but it gives me enough knowledge about it and the expansion to comment.
On Wednesday March 31st you wrote,
“I’m still waiting for a genius to tell these Diablo 3developers how to solve the Diablo 2hacking problem without the online component. I can’t think of any.Online only is not ideal but the job of adeveloper is not to make ideal utopias. Alas, we are made of flesh and blood. The job is to use the best available solution at the time. And I do not see a better solution to the Diablo 2problem than online.”
You aren’t the only one saying this. It’s disingenuous.
After reading The Element, there’s the notion that if you catch your child drawing on the walls, your first instinct may be to scold the child. You should, but the traditional punishment of taking away the child’s ability to draw altogether (removing the crayon) conveys to the kid that they need to not attempt drawing. Instead, stress the importance to the child that they shouldn’t draw on walls, of course, but make MUCH more emphasis on giving the child something to draw on.
Diablo 2 has 3 multiplayer modes. The first is through Battle.net and stores your character information on Blizzard’s servers you can’t tamper with this.
The second is LAN play with a locally made and stored character. You can hack these.
The third is that you can take that same LAN locally stored character and play online through Battle.net (treated seperately from the other online-only character).
1 is seperate from 2 and 3.
Of course, hackers modifying incoming and outgoing data to mux their Battle.net character happened. This was very infrequent based on my own anecdotal (and frequent, religious playing) experience and publicly. Blizzard will still have this issue regardless of online-only. It’s only a matter of time before hackers mess with data in transit. I’m sure Blizzard has top men/women on the job to catch this, but we all know you can never directly fight them, only try to incentivise alternative behavior.
Why didn’t Blizzard choose to employ the OPTION of having locally stored characters? There’s precident. They have the money and resources. Why not give the hackers a wall to write on and never the two environments mix?
There’re probably good reasons for it, but since there’s a lack of transperency from Blizzard (whose record with their community is almost nothing BUT transperency) their passionate fans and latent (and triumphantly returning) market is upset. It will pass, but the facts still remain: why not both and if not both, why? A unified experience?
My bets are with your other post about Blizzard’s Harmonious Online Community Utopia that they want to create. This is likely an extension of their stripping-of-anonymity initiative. We’ll see…
I keep seeing my past self in these type of emails. I mentioned before that I was opposed to Battle.net when it was first introduced. I was opposed to a subscription based game like World of Warcraft (“Who would pay for that?”). In one part, my expectations were frozen with the Warcraft 2 era that I expected every Blizzard game to spawn seven copies off of one CD, have thick manuals, have the game disc double as a music CD (I was so disappointed Starcraft didn’t have Red Book Audio), as well as having the cute zug zugs. Things like Battle.net made no sense to me then because Kali worked very well (Kali was like a community for online gamers back then where all our PC multiplayer games were going through Kali. Kali gave us mailboxes, could even get a private server if you wished, links to fan pages, etc. Jay Cotton was awesome.)
I have to admit when I was wrong and I was wrong about Blizzard in those days. I was a gamer and looked with gamer eyes. My expectations were established from the previous games. One amazing thing is how a new generation arises and makes whatever game their own. Like there is a generation of kids growing up with Starcraft 2 and making it their game. And that’s cool.
I believe Blizzard is allowing innovations in the Internet, of both trends you may or may not know, to drive the direction of Blizzard gaming. Single player games like Warcraft Adventures or Starcraft Ghost had passionate developer support but the business side killed them off. Why? Single player only does not fit where the business drivers are taking Blizzard. We will never see a single player only game from Blizzard just like we won’t see Nintendo make their games for hardware not made by Nintendo.
I cannot emphasize enough that all of Blizzard’s success resulted on riding the Internet trends. Warcraft 2, Starcraft, the Diablos, and World of Warcraft weren’t just ‘good games’, they utilized the Internet trends better than any game at that time period. And I never saw these trends coming.
Blizzard is pushing itself to evolve in an Internet context. Diablo 3’s online uses a mesh style which is significantly more difficult than the server based style of World of Warcraft. Asking for options for the old way is, in Blizzard’s eyes, like a 16-bit game asked an option to go 8-bit. Being a Diablo 2 player, it was around 12 years ago when that game came out. So much has changed since then.
I don’t see Blizzard as making entertainment software but in making entertainment Internet. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how Blizzard has gone through these transitions. When I bought Warcraft 3, I had no idea that in a few years I could digitally download the game to any computer including a Mac. The servers for the original Battle.Net games like Diablo and Starcraft are still online. People worried they might be unable to play Diablo 3 a decade from now because it is online only don’t have cause to worry with Blizzard’s track record.
I look at it from the experience point of view. Can you have the spawning experience with today’s Blizzard games? Actually, you can with the guest passes (and inevitable starter editions). Can you have the LAN experience with today’s multiplayer? Since the reason why we played LAN was to free ourselves from awful modems, today’s broadband provides a similar experience (unless you are e-sports pros but that is another issue).
I don’t see the negatives here. Aside from the servers going down which means everything going down, that issue appears temporary and will go away.
My question is that if the servers didn’t have any issues, would anyone be discussing this at all? Would anyone notice?
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