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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

#181

Post by AlwaysRock »

hajile wrote: post #133
AlwaysRock wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

You are making a case for why games have gotten worse based on money? Video game comapnies make far more money now than they ever have in the future. The market is also larger than its ever been.

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

#182

Post by headsoup »

hlbjhblbljib wrote: post #164
ddtaylor wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Would be nice to only play good ones. If only you could predict the experience you'd have by the developer.

Once upon a time we got things called 'demo discs' with our gaming mags that had a taste of the games coming out soon so we could inform ourselves.

It's nice to see lately that Steam is providing more demos, which should have been a thing all along, but the logic that demos is bad (and how they disappeared largely some time ago) is only a benefit for those wanting to shovel crap out.

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

#183

Post by headsoup »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #125
ddtaylor wrote: post #26

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.

I think this is the problem with growing access to a global audience(market). It doesn't matter if the product sucks if the marketing spend and reach is enough that you get X% of that global pie and make good money.

And it's an easy sell for investors too: release in a couple more countries and 'hey, sales doubled, everyone loves it!!'

There's plenty of indie quality out there, but it's immensely drowned out by the top end in marketing, influencing and availability.

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

#184

Post by BlueTemplar »

mschuster91 wrote: post #118
BlueTemplar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is patently false since plenty of games (including (modded, "classic") Diablo 2) still have real online multiplayer, with multiple anti-cheater/troll solutions : passwords, (unofficial) game admins, (potentially official DRM-backed) player whitelists & blacklists (potentially shared across hosts), not advertising your game-hosting IP on popular matchmaker servers... Please don't buy the "invasive DRM is good for…

For what it's worth I agree with you that there should be a legal mandate for game companies to make their online servers available for public download once the official servers get shut down. For the time in-between though... self-hosted servers are a niche market, and that is why companies don't care any more. Not enough players care to justify the expense, and ever since Hot Coffee and school shooters game compani…

You also still have games that don't even have any official game servers : Factorio for instance, and I guess "classic" modded Diablo 2 could be kind of considered to be it too since mods were never allowed on ("closed") Battle.net, only on "open" (not-)Battle.net ... (which IIRC only does matchmaking, while it's the player hosting the game that acts as the game server ?)

And Factorio has people setting up (usually renting in data centers ?) dedicated servers too (which then are at least accessible to everyone, unlike non-dedicated server games hosted on home networks where people not even bother to properly set up port forwarding any more, forgetting that not everyone relies on Steam to do the job for them...)

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

#185

Post by BlueTemplar »

lmilcin wrote: post #95
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #94

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…

The problem isn't requirement of being online. The problem is forcing people to be playing the game regularly or loose whatever they have "accomplished".

That's the worst part of playing Diablo 2 "classic" over Battle.net (rather than open Internet) : after 6 months of inactivity, your character and all the items you had stored on them are deleted from Blizzard's servers ! (And you don't get to keep an open copy of them.)

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

#186

Post by BlueTemplar »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #24
3pt14159 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It benefits the user AND the developer Notably it benefits good faith developers. I.e., the developers we actually want making games. The developers that lose under this model are the ones that make poor quality games. Though I admit it does not solve every dark pattern.

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 worse issue is that this incentivizes DRM : because you can just run the game for any duration by not using Steam after installation, or just using Steam in offline mode, since (IIRC that way game time is not counted).

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

#188

Post by BlueTemplar »

lithos wrote: post #144
tehbeard wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have numbers or links to hand, but i've seen this issue brought up by a number of indie devs. > so it’s not a lost sale Refunds probably count negatively to your rep. with a store.

Developers are responsible for all card fees related to refunds, fraud, and scams. Some indie devs are seeing Steam cuts of 46% due to fraud purchases and refunds. The Steam store is also set up so that “the customer wins” so heavily that most devs are afraid of clawing back fraud keys (since they’re going to turn into negative reviews, or the key fraudsters get revenge by targeting their game more heavily).

Which shows well (among other things), how if you release on Steam (or yet worse "platforms"), that you're not indie any more.

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

#189

Post by moepstar »

JadoJodo wrote: post #153
darkteflon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While that is only one datapoint, this only reinforces my absolute motivation to not give Sony another €, ever, again...

They've done themselves in, imho starting with their CD rootkit fiasco and, since then, they've time and again proven that Sony is a company that is not sincere, to say the least.

Sony TV? nope.. Sony camera? not for me... Sony whatever? yeah, no...

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