DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

The problem is akin to the TSA turning an airport into a concetration camp. Legitimate, paying customers are not only being profiled, but sequestered into a little holding pen while Blizzard makes sure you're not RMT. I thought online passes were insulting, but this is downright degrading to a customer.

The only people this is inconveniencing are legitimate customers. RMTs will not be affected.

This is not about Blizzard protecting you from cc fraud, it's only about protecting the RMAH. Were there no RMAH, they would not be doing this. All Diablo III's issues tend to stem from the RMAH, so we know how to fix those problems.

Get rid of it.

[Etra]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Then drive your fat ass down to the your local ANYTHING and grab a real copy.

If you're getting bent out of shape for the greater good of protecting against fraud (which, as Aeni said, is literally insane right now -- especially internationally), because you want to play a video game RIGHT NOW, you don't deserve the video game. If you want it at that very moment, go buy a real copy. Unless you're in a remote part of Alaska, you have no excuses.

God. Damn.

[cidbahamut]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Then drive your fat ass down to the your local ANYTHING and grab a real copy.

God damn.

Or Blizzard could just stop making bad decisions and provide proper service to paying customers.

[Etra]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Or Blizzard could just stop making bad decisions and provide proper service to paying customers.

They are. It's called protecting your CC from fraud if it's used to buy one of their games without you knowing.

herpfuckingderp.

[cidbahamut]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

They are. It's called protecting your CC from fraud if it's used to buy one of their games without you knowing.

herpfuckingderp.

This is not about Blizzard protecting you from cc fraud, it's only about protecting the RMAH.

BBQ and I agree on this point. What does that tell you?

[Kailea]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Another reason for me to hate Digital ;p Great job Blizzard.... great job! *thumbs up*

I will stick with this thank you



^.^

[Armando]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

They are. It's called protecting your CC from fraud if it's used to buy one of their games without you knowing.

Riddle me this: What's driving the insane amount of credit card fraud?

[Etra]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Riddle me this: What's driving the insane amount of credit card fraud?

China.

[Armando]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

China, or Chinese gold farmers that want to abuse the real money auction house?

[Taskmage]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

China, or Chinese gold farmers that want to abuse the real money auction house?

Gold farmers that want to abuse the RMAH. But that would be true whether Blizzard has officially sanctioned the process or not. There was a black market of RMT items in Diablo 2 as well, and the associated issues with hacking, duping, fraud and account theft. This is not a new thing. The difference now is that it's no longer as viable as in D2 to simply opt out of the economy, making the problems more visible to a bigger group of players, which puts pressure on Blizzard to crack down on the abuse.

[Armando]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

But that would be true whether Blizzard has officially sanctioned the process or not.

Very much true, but then you'd also have nice things like offline play. At the end of the day I think it all comes back to Blizzard/Activision wanting a cut of the money even if that means diminishing the player's experience. If it's not a new thing then they've successfully screwed you all over since they didn't actually improve the situation.

They're clever sons of bitches though. A game where your performance is so dependent on your gear and drops are random? It's the perfect game to slap on some real world money trade into.

[Taskmage]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they wanted a cut of the money and hoped to enhance the experience for the players in the process, but there's no disputing that they opened up a big ugly can of worms by doing so. I think that like certain fictional park owners they thought the measures they had implemented would keep everything clean and under control, but like genetically reconstituted velociraptors, RMT always finds a way. It's an open question whether it's even possible for them to entirely secure the environment and a bigger question whether they can do so without putting undue burden and inconvenience on innocent players, but as long as they're trying it's a given that they're going to make missteps and mistakes.

[Malacite]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

Also, players are reporting that Act 3 and Act 4 are dropping less quality and quantity of ilevel 63 gear. At first, Blizzard (Bashiok) brushed it off as simple perception, but a recent blue post suggests that there might be something wrong with the drop rates (and I suppose with that--quality) of loot in the later loot. TL:DR--it's more efficient to farm act 1 and act 2 even more so, since you are less likely to die, and get better loot. Personally, I'm in agreement with those players and after spending the last week grinding the fuck out of act 3, I still walk out of act 2 with a better bag of crap to sell--not to mention I found a yellow 1000 dps bow with a socket in it.

TM and I noticed this right away - we were both getting loads of rares off of literally every champion pack. I think they may have accidentally reversed the drop tables for all difficulties somehow... A1 and A2, regardless of difficulty atm, drop rares like candy.

[Icemage]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they wanted a cut of the money and hoped to enhance the experience for the players in the process, but there's no disputing that they opened up a big ugly can of worms by doing so. I think that like certain fictional park owners they thought the measures they had implemented would keep everything clean and under control, but like genetically reconstituted velociraptors, RMT always finds a way. It's an open question whether it's even possible for them to entirely secure the environment and a bigger question whether they can do so without putting undue burden and inconvenience on innocent players, but as long as they're trying it's a given that they're going to make missteps and mistakes.

I think the biggest problem I have with this is that somewhere along the line, Blizzard changed focus from being all about improving the gameplay experience for the player, to improving the bottom line.

Take Diablo 2 as an example. D2's code is technically brilliant in so many ways; to this day, I've not seen any other game implement so many clever technical tricks to improve the basic player experience. Virtually everything in D2 is computed with integer math instead of floating points (for the math-challenged, that means whole numbers instead of fractions). That doesn't seem like a big difference until you realize that this is a baseline level design decision - you have to begin with this idea from the start and implement it rigorously throughout the code. You can't just add it in later as a "feature". The overall effect of that decision is that D2 uses a very, very small amount of data for transporting information about online gameplay (monster positioning, effects, player movement, player health, etc.) which reduces latency. It also makes computations lightning fast, hence why the game runs so well even on low end hardware. None of these things were done to increase profitability, except insofar as it pleases the player and therefore sells more copies of the game, but I assure you it's a lot of effort in both design and coding to make sure this sort of philosophy is upheld throughout development.

Compare and contrast to Diablo 3. I haven't seen any technical breakdowns of D3's design yet - it's far too early - but while it's clear that Blizzard are trying to provide a good experience, they are hamstrung everywhere by their own design choices. D3's approach from day 1 was "RMAH" and almost all of the features we see in it now spring from that. If you have the Real Money Auction House, you need to be able to have a foundation of trust by the playerbase. If you have to have trust, that means you can't have scammers and hackers. If don't want people hacking or duping items, you have to take all of the control away from the player and move the information about things like inventory to a central server instead of on the player's PC. While you "could" set up a separate single player campaign with items that were for local play and not usable on the RMAH, that would mean people would be spending their time playing offline - and not feeding the market engine of the RMAH, at which point we've come full circle.

Unfortunately, these are issues that literally cannot be fixed by Blizzard. It's a domino effect and the only way to fix it would be to rip out the RMAH (which Activision will never arrow).


Icemage

[Armando]

Re: DIABLO III - J9's thread of infernal enthusiasm!

You can't just add it in later as a "feature". The overall effect of that decision is that D2 uses a very, very small amount of data for transporting information about online gameplay (monster positioning, effects, player movement, player health, etc.) which reduces latency. It also makes computations lightning fast, hence why the game runs so well even on low end hardware.

That's very interesting, what's your source? I'd like to read more about it. Also, would the speed advantage hold true these days, or are floating point calculations comparable in speed to integer math on CPUs these days?