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You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

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Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

#151
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today) and only had a handful of developers. By all rights, games should be costing $150-200 given the complexity and amount of human effort required. Instead, they've cut costs everywhere. When you pay your devs 50k per year while requiring 60-80hr work weeks, experienced devs aren't going to apply. Young, inexperienced devs fill the roles instead and make junior dev mistakes all over the…

>Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today) and only had a handful of developers. By all rights, games should be costing $150-200 given the complexity and amount of human effort required. Instead, they've cut costs everywhere. Except the number of people with the skills to make games has increased (which depresses gamedev salaries), the tooling to make and publish games has become cheaper (or outright free with tools and engi…

Look at modern games. They are almost all bug-ridden until the second DLC (if ever) which is probably just base content they moved out to pad the cost. By that point, you've spent $120 on the game anyway.

As they say: Cheap, fast, and good -- pick two.

With a larger talent pool and all the hard problems already solved, you'd expect games to INCREASE in quality with fewer bugs and issues. If they threw cheap out the window and were charging $200, they could hire and retain experienced talent who would make far fewer mistakes and the quality would increase dramatically.

EDIT: To address number of people further, lets say there are 100x more talent now than in 1993. If 5 people developed Doom and 500 people are needed for a modern AAA title, then the effective supply to demand ratio hasn't changed.

Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

#152
post #12
post #3

Diablo 2 resurrected was the most infuriating experience I have had. I bought it in the Switch store against my better judgment, partly because in their support forum they said that offline mode would of course always be offline. For the first few days people could hardly even start the game, I tried to return it right away, because it's basically a bricked game at this point, but Nintendo doesn't want to refund swit…

Consumers need to demand better refund systems from the big console makers. On Steam if you don't like a game, or if it doesn't work for you, you can get a full refund no questions asked as long as it's within 14 days and with less than 2 hours playtime. In certain circumstances they even give refunds after 2 hours playtime (e.g. you spend 2+ hours debugging the game and trying to get it to run) This should be standa…

> On Steam if you don't like a game, or if it doesn't work for you, you can get a full refund no questions asked as long as it's within 14 days and with less than 2 hours playtime.

There's a hole here: that 14 days is from time of _purchase_ not _access_.

I preordered _Humankind_ a month or two before launch, because it was listed as supporting MacOS. At launch, it didn't. It didn't get Mac support until 3 weeks later, even though that functionality was barely alpha quality with huge graphics and playability bugs. (Even today, months later, Mac support is barely at beta quality. And if you're on M1 you've got to manually configure the app for being run on Rosetta.)

I waited 12 days after launch before giving up and requesting a refund. That refund was denied, because they had taken my money months before. Steam support was unmoved by my assertion that the developer was flat out lying about Mac playability, and that I literally had no way of playing the game as advertised.

Be careful with your preorders, y'all.

Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

#153
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers need to demand better refund systems from the big console makers. On Steam if you don't like a game, or if it doesn't work for you, you can get a full refund no questions asked as long as it's within 14 days and with less than 2 hours playtime. In certain circumstances they even give refunds after 2 hours playtime (e.g. you spend 2+ hours debugging the game and trying to get it to run) This should be standa…

Honestly all of the refunds I’ve done on Xbox have been completely painless.

On the other end of the spectrum is Sony. Of the several times I've called in seeking a refund due to a game's (lack of) performance, only twice have I reached a live person within the 60-minutes I allotted to wait in the phone queue. Their chat support is also terrible, responding with generic "We don't offer refunds"-type messages regardless of the issue.

Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

#154
post #3

Diablo 2 resurrected was the most infuriating experience I have had. I bought it in the Switch store against my better judgment, partly because in their support forum they said that offline mode would of course always be offline. For the first few days people could hardly even start the game, I tried to return it right away, because it's basically a bricked game at this point, but Nintendo doesn't want to refund swit…

Stop giving these hacks money, it's fucking easy. I love Diablo 2, but the current Actiblizzard can go bankrupt before I enable their shitty practices and my purchase figures on some MBA's slide as a positive signal that customers are happy, let's keep doing what we're doing. Yes, that's what your $50 you've written off are doing.

It's not rocket science, especially in the current golden age of gaming, where there's plenty of excellent choice on indie, AA and some AAA publishers portfolio.

Yet people keep complaining and then lining up to buy the latest Battlefield and CoD and shitty remaster.

Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

#155
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers need to demand better refund systems from the big console makers. On Steam if you don't like a game, or if it doesn't work for you, you can get a full refund no questions asked as long as it's within 14 days and with less than 2 hours playtime. In certain circumstances they even give refunds after 2 hours playtime (e.g. you spend 2+ hours debugging the game and trying to get it to run) This should be standa…

> On Steam if you don't like a game, or if it doesn't work for you, you can get a full refund no questions asked as long as it's within 14 days and with less than 2 hours playtime. There's a hole here: that 14 days is from time of _purchase_ not _access_. I preordered _Humankind_ a month or two before launch, because it was listed as supporting MacOS. At launch, it didn't. It didn't get Mac support until 3 weeks late…

That doesn't sound right. I've pre-ordered a game via Steam and gotten it refunded after launch many months later. For pre-orders, the refund clock starts ticking at launch...unless the game includes early access.

Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of us don't care and we just want to play vidya games.

You are getting down voted but that is what most players care about it. It's the reason COD and every 2K or sports game gets worse every year. It's the reason Pokemon somehow continues to become more and more souless. It's the reason companies can put out shit and still print money.

Give people more credit, they will play what they're offered, it's not their fault they're offered crap.

Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

#157

I know folks on this site don't like it, but in the wider gaming community, there is essentially no demand among legitimate buyers for an always offline gaming option. We have access to the internet almost no matter where we are, or can easily get it. Why should we care if a game needs to check in periodically? What harm is it likely to do to any given legitimate buyer? It's almost certainly worth it to Blizzard to l…

Probably it's an issue more with older people who remember when this kind of thing was unheard of. In the modern day people are online all the time anyways, it doesn't make a big practical difference, which makes the ethical issues seem overblown.

Regardless, I paid for my "license" to use the software on my personal machine, I shouldn't have to rely on someone else's machine to make that happen.

Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

#158
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are responsible for your actions. What you fund, you encourage.

Pretty sure then as a tax paying citizen that I'm responsible for drone assassinations etc., so by comparison the entire Blizzard drama would be pretty low on the priority list by that logic.

The logic remains valid,

and according to your interpretation stealing a car seems "not a big deal" because it comes after a murder. (They are disconnected events, so to relate them is just a mental perspective - their gravity is independent. There is no «priority» forgiving your actions, it is no excuse).

Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda, but it also incentivizes bad-faith gamers, which in turn disincentivises good-faith developers. There are a lot of games out there with a Perhaps such a system could work if it were based on a percentage of time-to-complete, but I have no idea how one would objectively determine that, especially before sale.

> a 2hr no-questions-asked policy is unfortunately often abused to return the games after completing them. How often does it happen, though? I mean if you refund a game after finishing it, it's the same as saying 'I'd rather have pirated that game', not a good sign it's 'good-faith' game either

(even if it can still be abused by bad-faith players)

Re: You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

#160
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an entirely different game (more of a CRPG than action), but the more modern Divinity Original Sin games are excellent too. DOS2 is my favorite RPG, and it can be played by itself (its story has basically no links to DOS1)

Divine Divinity != DOS

Which is why I said "it's an entirely different game"! :D

It has little to do with DD or BD, but it's still a very fun game.

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