Bye Bye Diablo 3

[Panda with issues...]

Again, they won't want to do that because they'd much rather funnel you in the direction of buying items.

I think I'm being funnelled in the direction of other games...

 

[Zooggy]

Hey,

Let blizzard authenticate that your offline character is legit, unhacked, and bring it into the online world if you change your mind.

I don't know the innards of the Diablo franchise, but in general terms, this is a technical impossibility. If I hack my character to have stuff that should take me five hundred hours to achieve, you can't tell the difference between me having played five hundred hours or me having hacked the character.

Cheers,
J.

 

[Kasatka]

Th thing is that ultimately player choice is what makes a game choice - be it choice of race and class when making a character (Diablo has only ever allowed humans, but has greatly increased the number of classes with each release), a good array of equipment and items (Yeah, again Diablo has been fine on this front) or an inspiring array of bad guys to hack and slash your way through (Diablo could do with some improvement here - some enemies were recoloured models).
One big aspect of choice for in any game is that of cheating - you as a player should have every right to cheat in a game, but ONLY in singleplayer. Multiplayer is the realm of playing fairly and competitively. So when Blizzard act like they want to forcibly merge single and multiplayer, it makes no sense to me.

I mean i used to have offline characters i'd use editors on and various mods for the game, and then online characters i'd play legit cause it's more fun with others. Why Blizzard are trying to merge all of this is beyond me... oh wait, that's why: they are money grabbing *expletives deleted*...

 

[Silk]

Hey,



I don't know the innards of the Diablo franchise, but in general terms, this is a technical impossibility. If I hack my character to have stuff that should take me five hundred hours to achieve, you can't tell the difference between me having played five hundred hours or me having hacked the character.

Cheers,
J.

You could:

Compare character time played vs time elapsed since D3 launch
Compare character start/end dates and hours played
Check for character having same GUID as another online character (checking for cloned or duped)
Check all character weps and items were obtained in one of the worlds matching the character has played in (store GUID from each world as the character enters it, then lookup
Check weps/items were obtained from the GUID of a mob or chest that was generated in the same GUID of one of the the worlds the character was spawned on. Yes everytime something is killed or opened it's GUID and loot table is stored locally.

and so on..

And yes all these GUIDS can be stored; if you hack that data your character will likely never be usable online due to these checks; you would have to be extremely maticulous to match all the relevant data pairings up (not to mention the initial decryption you would have to break). None of this is easy to design or code hence the fee (which would ultimately end up in profit).

Granted nothing is "unhackable", but this applies to the online world too.

 

[BiG D]

You could do all that stuff, but all you would accomplish is adding a few hours to the inevitable hack. You can't trust info stored on the client, period.

 

[Zooggy]

Hoy,

character time played [...]
character start/end dates [...]
Check for character [...] GUID
[Etc...]

All this stuff would be stored where, exactly?

Seriously, you think people that are anal enough to figure out how to hack in gear and stats and stuff can't wrap their head around timestamps and GUIDs?

Granted nothing is "unhackable", but this applies to the online world too.

That's true enough. However, hacking some files stored in your own machine is (a) not illegal, and (b) technically trivial. Hacking a database in an online server, however, is illegal, difficult, and rare enough that, every time it happens, it shows up on the freaking news...

It's not the same order of magnitude at all...

Cheers,
J.

 

[Silk]

I'm of the mind that nothing is impossible, merely a technical challenge (I'm a developer after all). The encrypted GUID stuff was a 2 second brainstorm list, not comprehensive by any means.

If it did turn out to be too much of an obstacle, same suggestions minus the offline-online transfer. Still a pretty good idea I'd say.

 

[Ki!ler-Mk1]

They are inviting hackers to find a way to trick bnet games into thinking they're online when they're not.

 

[BiG D]

If it did turn out to be too much of an obstacle, same suggestions minus the offline-online transfer. Still a pretty good idea I'd say.

Yes, they could implement a system that makes (most) everyone happy. No, they aren't going to. This is an activision-run company, profit takes presidence over customers, employees and games. Not sure why this is so surprising.

 

[Xarlaxas]

I don't think many of us are surprised by it.

 

[thatbloke]

relevant

 

[Ki!ler-Mk1]

If blizzard gets the item level requirements correct, the above may not necessarily always be true. That said, im sure there will be a rash of children stealing from parents because of it.

 

[Kasatka]

Well as long as the option to choose who you play online with exists, i wouldn't care about MT trade. However if they go for a stupid public matchmaking service i would rather just cut my balls off than play, even if it is the successor to Diablo 2...

 

[Panda with issues...]

One thing I've learned over time is that games that are labled 'the true/spiritual/etc successor to x' rarely deliver, and that there is nothing stopping you from just going back and playing the original.

System Shock 2
WiC
Homeworld
Thief and Thief 2
Resident Evil 4

all these still get play, despite being old games.

I've played diablo 2 infrequently since its release, but it has been replayed.

 

[Kasatka]

Add to that list Deus Ex, C&C Tiberium Sun, Baldur's Gate 2 and Fallout 2.

 

[Ki!ler-Mk1]

Wheres the starcraft broodwar love!

 

[Panda with issues...]

Wheres the starcraft broodwar love!

Can't seem to find it. (Hates Starcraft)

 

[Ghostwolf67]

Can't seem to find it. (Hates Starcraft)

Pretty sure that statement is synonymous with declaring war on South Korea.

 

[Tempscire]

Pretty sure that statement is synonymous with declaring war on South Korea.

You know that's something the North Koreans have never considered. Sure they have a bigger military than South Korea, but think of all the strategy geniuses that are knocking about there! All S. Korea needs to do is to contract Blizzard to make military command software based upon Starcraft's UI, stick [ReD]NaDa in a chair and away they go!

 

[BiG D]

I think you're confusing "strategy" and "clicking really fast."