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Diablo III coming May 15

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Re: Diablo III coming May 15

#81

Post by cowkingdeluxe »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #71
Jimmie wrote: post #11

"Online Only" sucks. No LAN and no mods make me a sad boy.

Really? I strongly support this model. Supporting both Blizzard hosted servers and a local server for offline play is a huge amount of work for a teeny tiny percentage of the population. I'd much rather those resources be invested in something more worthy. It sucks because Diablo 1 and 2 supported local play but if Diablo 3 were the first in the series I don't think anyone would be complaining.

LAN is what made Diablo 1 and 2 great, not the "battle.net".

This is a step down in features for the consumer (just like the step down in features for Starcraft 2 from 1). There's no reason to paint a rosy picture about it. Last I checked there were still more active custom Warcraft 3 games than SC2 games and that speaks volumes.

You honestly think they said "hmm, let's save money by requiring online to play so we can better serve the customer." or do you think they said "let's make more money by further ensuring the integrity of our real money auction house and giving us more control over the product."

Re: Diablo III coming May 15

#83

Post by cowkingdeluxe »

anonymoushn wrote: post #72
Jimmie wrote: post #11

"Online Only" sucks. No LAN and no mods make me a sad boy.

Indeed. I'm surprised so many people here are lining up to buy a game with Assassin's Creed 2 DRM built in.

It's because they are fans of blizzard and do not apply logic to the situation. They see what is happening, but they've already decided that Blizzard is a good company and wouldn't do it for bad reasons. So they think up facts to support their position. They think a multi-billion dollar company owned by Activision is doing it for the consumer and not for profits/real money auction house/etc.

Re: Diablo III coming May 15

#84

Post by onemoreact »

politician wrote: post #47
rkalla wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would lie if I said the same thought hadn't crossed my mind... while we are still in the era of comments like yours (and mind) being brushed off somewhat half-jokingly, can you even imagine in 10-20 years what kind of addiction-causing experience games will be? I think we are still 2 generations of game tech away from it, but at some point the addiction many people experienced with pathetically unadvanced games lik…

China has the demographics for pervasive addiction today with its moderately educated, underemployed, sexually-suppressed overpopulation of males (35M more males than females in 2009). This should lead to massive political unrest as in the Arab Spring and the knee-capped Iranian revolt of '09, but hasn't. I suspect that a significant force behind this pacification is gaming. Instead of banning Skinner boxes like WoW…

Without doing anything 105 Men are born per 100 woman. With a population of ~1.338 billion you would expect up to 1000/205 * 5 = 32 million extra men. Men don't live as long as woman on average which tends to balance the genders. But, China's population demographics are also messed up from 1 child policy so it's a little more complex than you might think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_ratio

PS: Also, women tend to have more marriages per lifetime than men which shifts things a fair amount.

Re: Diablo III coming May 15

#85

Post by Jimmie »

cowkingdeluxe wrote: post #81
forrestthewoods wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I strongly support this model. Supporting both Blizzard hosted servers and a local server for offline play is a huge amount of work for a teeny tiny percentage of the population. I'd much rather those resources be invested in something more worthy. It sucks because Diablo 1 and 2 supported local play but if Diablo 3 were the first in the series I don't think anyone would be complaining.

LAN is what made Diablo 1 and 2 great, not the "battle.net". This is a step down in features for the consumer (just like the step down in features for Starcraft 2 from 1). There's no reason to paint a rosy picture about it. Last I checked there were still more active custom Warcraft 3 games than SC2 games and that speaks volumes. You honestly think they said "hmm, let's save money by requiring online to play so we ca…

Yep. I have many fond memories of LAN'ing with my friends. I also spent more time playing mods for D2 than I did playing vanilla.

Hell, my favourite mod is still being actively developed: http://modsbylaz.hugelaser.com/

Re: Diablo III coming May 15

#86

Post by rkalla »

digitalsushi wrote: post #69
rkalla wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would lie if I said the same thought hadn't crossed my mind... while we are still in the era of comments like yours (and mind) being brushed off somewhat half-jokingly, can you even imagine in 10-20 years what kind of addiction-causing experience games will be? I think we are still 2 generations of game tech away from it, but at some point the addiction many people experienced with pathetically unadvanced games lik…

I agree there is a mental pandemic to be. Imagine 20 years out when ultraporn, AI, and VR helmets are a suitable replacement to having a relationship with real humans. I'm all for tech, but I think that tech that splits us up and disconnects us really does make us a little less human. There's another side to it that lonely people could technically be happier in such a configuration, so maybe my argument is nullified…

I am very familiar with this thought process... "being totally hooked in is evil and detrimental because movies show me they are!" -- but then you think about it... what if your life IS just better in the virtual reality? How is that a bad thing?

You are here to have an experience, logging on and having that experience elsewhere is fine if it isn't destroying lives around you.

Then you think 40 or 50 years out with undetectable differences between virtual reality and real-reality and you wonder if at some point we did get lost in a virtual world we created for ourselves a la Matrix... how would we know?

You could also imagine a world within a world once the virtual world is so real it isn't as fun.

Endless recursion :)

Re: Diablo III coming May 15

#87

Post by rkalla »

qdog wrote: post #51
rkalla wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would lie if I said the same thought hadn't crossed my mind... while we are still in the era of comments like yours (and mind) being brushed off somewhat half-jokingly, can you even imagine in 10-20 years what kind of addiction-causing experience games will be? I think we are still 2 generations of game tech away from it, but at some point the addiction many people experienced with pathetically unadvanced games lik…

I lost a couple years of life to playing MUDs a while back. Still occasionally log on, the ability to type commands makes it much easier to have a complex game and environment, but not so much with the pretty pictures. Luckily, I've sworn off Blizzard since they sued the bnetd guys, so D3 isn't a concern for me.

Swearing off Blizz won't save you; it'll just be Valve then or EA or Mojang or Zynga... they'll get you eventually :)

Re: Diablo III coming May 15

#88

Post by MartinCron »

fbuilesv wrote: post #60
jeremymcanally wrote: post #13

Oh, they're fiendish indeed. They're offering the game for free if you sign up for a year of WoW. That's just mean. I managed to abstain from that, but I did pre-buy and pre-load the game. I was just so excited they had Mac support (which, last I'd heard, was sort of up in the air I thought).

The Mac support has always been great for Blizzard games and D3 is no exception. I've been playing the beta in a 2009 MBP for a couple of weeks now and everything looks pretty smooth. Unlike companies like EA, Blizzard spends real time making sure their Mac offerings are as good as the Windows ones and that is enough for myself to be a supporter.

I've been playing the beta in a 2009 MBP for a couple of weeks now and everything looks pretty smooth.

Question about heat: My wife's MBP (2011) runs what seems to be dangerously hot doing even basic web video and she's worried that D3 will melt it entirely.

Re: Diablo III coming May 15

#89

Post by gte910h »

TheCapn wrote: post #9
arien wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Betas (open, and closed too, to a degree) these days seem more like, "let's subtly have people try our product for free, get hooked and generate buzz while at it". It's the same as a free trial (although calling it like this has less positive response, it seems). Just another marketing stunt, long gone are the days where beta was used strictly for testing. On the Web 2.0 environment, who started this? Was it Google w…

You're right and you're wrong. Blizzard DOES use the beta for hype. With SC2 they gave beta keys to preorders to help generate revenue and interest prior to launch. Not a lot of participants actually know the reason for a beta and actually use it as an excuse to play the game early but Blizzard already knows this. Blizzard's job of releasing a public/invite beta is to test: A) How the game functions on the boat-load…

I have tried a Blizzard beta before, they have lots of nice error reporting functionality which I reported several bugs on

I don't know how you expect for them to get good data on what people do to accurately test unless they do a large scale beta to test it

Re: Diablo III coming May 15

#90

Post by archangel_one »

simonsarris wrote: post #68
thetron wrote: post #12

I am super excited for this, but a little disappointed that Blizzard apparently doesn't understand exchange rates. The Australian dollar is currently worth (marginally) more than the US Dollar, and yet the game costs an extra $20 here. I don't understand how this is justifiable.

I'm not sure if you're having a rhetorical meow or just want to know what's going on here, so I'll offer an explanation. It's not about exchange rates and never ever will be. It's about purchasing power. It's just normal market segmentation, like how textbooks are cheaper in India/China than in the U.S. Whats the average purchasing power of an Australain versus an American? The Australian dollar is worth more than th…

I am not sure I believe that Australians have a higher purchasing power than Americans. Certainly for an example I'm more familiar with, the game costs NZ$109.99 in New Zealand, which is US$90 at the moment. I can assure you that the purchasing power of an average NZer is less than that of an average American, so goodness knows why it has to be so much more expensive. This is fairly standard on a lot of things - books, DVDs etc - and I can only presume it's simply because they know they can get away with it because people have gotten used to games costing about $100 without worrying about what that means in the publisher's native currency.
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