That one by itself is three strikes for me. It moved Diablo 3 from my "must buy the second it comes out" list into my "maybe get it when it drops to $5.... maybe" list. Of course knowing Blizzard, that means I'll never get it at all.

I'm a big fan of Diablo. Side effect of this DRM will be that this will be firs missed episode. I will in near future move to the small village and I will have only access to the mobile Internet. there is no reasonable broadband access. So I will have to miss this one. I will miss Diablo. I have ended Diablo 1, Diablo hellfire, Diablo 2 and LoD. I got most of them in the day they were released. I won't have that luxury anymore.

It's something no one knows except Blizzard I guess. We have seen reports about other games having pretty low multiplayer activity like Demigod's 21%, but it certainly must vary from game to game.

I don't think them making it all online is necessarily a sign of Diablo 2 statistics though. I think it's more a sign that they want to attract customers who will truly invest in the game and play it long term rather than people like me who would install it, beat it, then move on to other things. Those players that stick around have a much greater chance of paying for supplementary content. They likely think the side effects will be minimal because singleplayer people will give in.

I'm personally expecting to see some nasty unintended consequences from the decision to allow RMT in D3. For instance, the ability to make any kind of significant money (with a very low barrier to entry) is going to make the game a much bigger target for various exploits that were seen in D2, such as duping, botting, and the "hacked" items (e.g. ITH weapons). I played quite a bit of D2 on bnet back in the day, and such activities had a major impact even on people who weren't trying to trade items. When the amount of botting increased the servers often couldn't handle it, with latency for everyone trying to play increasing to a constant 300-500 ms. And since many duping methods involved glitching the servers whenever such a new duping method came out the servers would get hammered so hard that it was often near impossible to even log in for several days.

While Blizzard has almost certainly stepped up their security against these kinds of things for D3, they've also made their game a much more temping target for such activities, and if the increased security isn't sufficiently proportional to this then they're going to be seeing a lot of problems that will make the game a thoroughly miserable experience for everyone, compounded by the fact that there will be no option to play offline and thus avoid these problems. If this does happen I'll have to try very hard to contain my feelings of schadenfreude, although I make no promises.

This pretty much sums up the thread and why people should care (even if they don't).

If you want everything to be a rental, OnLive style this is a step in that direction. Apparently full prices for rentals are where we'll be starting out.

I know I bitch about Steam constantly, but I'd sign up tomorrow if I could somehow get people to not buy D3 under these conditions. Yes, it's that much worse.
Have they even fixed this in WOW? Guild banks were still getting ripped off and liquidated through like 5 throwaway mule accounts back in TBC.

I think D3 people are going to find out just what MMO people have been dealing with all these years and I'm not so sure a significant portion of the audience overlaps. Botting and duping were bad in D2, I remember those days, but there's a whole world of hurt even without that (as you said, bots and farming are a big part of it).

"Region blockade" as in "Fuck you, German, you lost the war and therefore can't play with your girlfriend from the States?"

Exactly ;-)

Also: you gamers are so freaking lazy sitting on your asses, so we assume you don't have any friends who don't live in your city or at least your country, so it's not a problem for you.

By Mike:

"Many of you are already aware of the big news that we recently shared about Diablo III. Alongside the gold-based auction house, we will include an auction house within Diablo III that will allow players to trade items using real money. This auction house will be a secure and safe environment for players to trade their items (indiscernible). In the previous game, Diablo II, we did not offer such a feature which resulted in many players turning to unscrupulous third-party services to purchases items. We felt that because players clearly wanted such a feature, it made sense for us to build it in Diablo III, so they could trade in a more convenient and secured manner than going through an unauthorized third party.

Players who participate in these optional system will be able to list items on the Auction House for a flat fee, with another charge for completed transactions. When listing an item for sale, players will have the ability to direct the proceeds either to their e-balance, which will remain on Battle.net or to cash out through a third-party service. We have not disclosed specific fess, but we plan on keeping them nominal so that more players can participate in it if they so choose, and so that players will opt to use our secured approved method of item trading and not churn to third parties. We will also allow a limited number of free listings each week so players can build up a balance without needing to deposit any funds to get started.

As for the upcoming beta, Diablo III is still on track to go into external beta testing later this quarter and we are still working hard to ship the game before the end of the year. However, we are not ready to commit to a release date at this time. What I can tell you is that the press who visited us last week played a near final version of the beta content and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. We are very much looking forward to getting the beta into the hands of our players and collecting their feedback for the final phase of development."

When he says "players clearly wanted such a feature" you have to wonder how many players. What kind of percentage of people who played Diablo 2 were buying and selling items on ebay and shit? I can't imagine it was more than 10% of people but maybe I am way off.

In any case as a singleplayer gamer I couldn't care less about the auction house. I just want an offline game experience. Give me that and you get $60 on release day.

lol, the real fun starts when the IRS gets involved. Minors and adults can generate income from this . . . maybe lots of income. Sooner or later the IRS will take notice and start demanding you pay taxes on the income . . . =)

I assume Blizzard is prepared to share info with the IRS concerning these payouts that they will be making . . . ; P

I was working on a joke for this but decided against it. However, I will ruin the oppurtunity for everyone else.


Profit meme.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/profit

So I get that clear. I am allowed to sell stuff via the auction house to people I don't know. For real money. And people are dumb enough to pay for it? And Blizzard gets money from the AH stuff as well? And they still charge 60 USD (or probably 100 USD in Europe) for the game itself instead of giving it away for free and rely on the AH income?
And for paying 60 Euro I am not allowed to play via internet with my girlfriend!

So actually what they want to do is establishing a new game in a market that currently only has Mythos (MMO hack&slay) but charge initial money for it.

Possibly the AH will have game money as well then, but all in all Diablo 3 is going to have the issue that Mythos, while maybe not being as polished, is initially for free. I doubt World of Warcraft would have been a big success with all the F2P MMORPGs around we have today. So Blizzard copies a new trend and settles in it with a (probably high quality) product.

For classical Hack&Slay players we will see Torchlight 2 with optional multiplayer. Which I will get instead.

Once the game takes off, the smart thing for Blizzard to do will be to make it free to play, like Valve did with TF2.

ok guys wait before we go further, what is internets?

"CEO Max Schaefer – a co-creator of the original Diablo while at Blizzard North – told Eurogamer that he sees the "onerous" DRM measure as an unavoidable consequence of Diablo 3's ambitious trading features. As such, he argued, it's a valid move."

Link