Blizzard: Continuing down the path to the darkside

Yep, so now in addition to stripping LAN play from their games, Blizzard is now taking away offline play altogether, even in single player mode. AND they're going to make additional money by allowing players to pay for items with real-world currency on the auction house, as if they weren't being greedy enough already by their other douchebag move. And let's not kid ourselves folks, there is absolutely NO reason other than to combat piracy that Blizzard could not have simply done the same thing they did with Diablo II; offering open battle.net for single player characters while having a separate more secure battle.net for players who want to save their characters online.

My excitement for this game just dropped by several orders of magnitude. In fact, this could be a deal-breaker for me, because to be perfectly honest I don't really feel like I need another Diablo game anyway; Diablo II wrapped up the main story arc, and besides I think Diablo, while still a strong series, is Blizzard's weakest of their three main franchises.

While it may be true that 99.9% of gamers have an Internet connection, that's not the fucking point or a valid argument to implement this cheap excuse for DRM. This is not a god damn MMO; it does not need a permanent Internet connection, and there are plenty of instances where the battle.net servers can be down for maintenance, I'm in a place where I currently don't have access to an Internet connection, OR my ISP just feels like acting up and basically saying FUCK YOU to me when I want to play. Hell, the battle.net servers could even be up but still run really shitty and laggy some nights, and I don't always feel like putting up with that shit. That happened ALL THE TIME with Diablo II online.

Assassin's Creed II PC tried to pull similar bullshit like this with disastrous results. I read one player review where because he kept having connection issues, the game would fail to save when he suddenly gets booted out for losing connection to the servers and then he would have to redo large portions of the game.

What pisses me off even more than when companies sell out like this though, is people who defend them for doing it. Their excuses are always shitty and half-assed. The people who make excuses for this are the same people who defend garbage like the full-body scanners at the airport. I mean yeah, it's true that I don't really have anything to hide so I should be OK, right? Except that it's still taking a naked picture of me and some asshole gets a free picture of my penis. And yeah, sure it's a fuzzy x-ray image of my penis, but it's still a picture of my god damn penis, and it's none of their business to see me like that when I just want to board a fucking plane.

TL;DR, fuck Blizzard for becoming the money-grubbing sellouts that they now are, and also fuck anyone who is apologetic for this shallow DRM nonsense.

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Activision has been one of the most evilist unglist fucking geedest companies I have ever seen. Wasn't always like that. It was when Activision became one with Blizzard.

The deal closed July 9, 2008. The company believed that the merging of the two companies would create "the world’s largest and most profitable pure-play video game publisher"

HAAA! No reason towards making good games once so ever, just making money like a fucking SLUT! Fucking soulless abomination. I will always have anger with Activision Blizzard. Always

I'm in Australia. He's kind of full of shit, considering something like 50% of gamers here have a decidedly stable internet connection.

Anyway, not purchasing this game. I am going to pirate it, or at least wait for the inevitable LAN and DRM-ripped mods to the game. Otherwise it's pretty much a wasted purchase for me.

Maybe if LulzSec had formed a bit later they could've proven a point with the battle.net servers and actually have done something useful.


But, you know, the world doesn't run on magical wish juice.

Torchlight 2 is probably going to be better.

I'm as mad about this as anyone else, but I'm still buying it. Why? Well, 1) I do happen have a very good internet connection and 2) will never be using the auction house seeing as I never trade with anyone.

Personally, I'm looking forward to Grim Dawn more. But then I remembered, "Hey, I could buy Diablo 3, Torchlight 2, and Grim Dawn." So that's what I'm going to do.

Double post because I'm awesome.

Blizzard responds to Diablo 3 "always online" complaint

They still should add an offline option.

Constant connectivity is just something I can't manage. Hell, just going from an average here, I'm usually left without internet for half the month, anyway.

So let's go over Blizzard's excuses:

So how were we supposed to interpret this statement then? "[Wilson] also said that piracy was a factor in this decision. . ." Oops. So now after receiving complaints they conveniently went from "It was kinda a factor, but not a 'deciding' factor *nudgewink*," to "What-what? We didn't discuss piracy at all!"



But more importantly, I don't really give a shit whether Blizzard considers it a form of DRM or not. From my perspective, and under most definitions from a gamer's perspective, it is. Telling us "Well we don't think of it as DRM," is not going to change the fact that it is.

It's like Bill O'Reilly the other day stating that he doesn't think the Norway bomber was an extremist Christian. Well good thing it's NOT UP TO YOU TO DECIDE THAT SMUGFAG, because in REALITY he only wrote about a hundred times in his manifesto that he considers himself to be a modern day Knights Templar for Christianity, so you can shove your opinion right back up the ass you pulled it from, because it certainly didn't come from your brain.

Again, under the Diablo II system there would be no issues like this either; only if you chose to go on open battle.net which you didn't have to.

I'll be the judge of what's considered an "enhancement", and I don't find it an "enhancement" that I am given less options on how I want to play the game.

Wait, since when was this ever considered a "problem"? Fucking morons. You know how you avoid this "problem" with Diablo II? JUST CHOOSE NOT TO MAKE A SINGLE PLAYER CHARACTER THEN, DUMBASS. It amazes me how they try to frame having more options as being a bad thing.

Hey guys guess what, you know how games used to have that annoying problem where you had to change the screen resolution to fit your monitor? Well I'm going to eliminate that problem for my game by forcing 1080p resolution. Now you don't have to waste your time navigating menus to adjust the resolution; it's just already set to the best setting for you! What's that? Don't have an HD monitor or TV? Oh, well, tough shit for you then, because obviously 99.9% of gamers have them at all times, so you should anyway.

Oh well THANK YOU for reassuring us this at least, because I was soooo fucking concerned about people using their Bnet accounts as substitutes for Twitter.

Stop making excuses, and give me back my single player for my NON-MMO GAME you greedy sacks of shit.

They did? Where?

Shit yeah, fucking finally! You don't know how awful it is to change the resolution when I could spend that precious two minutes already playing the game.

"Stop making excuses, and give me back my single player for my NON-MMO GAME you greedy sacks of shit."

Nice Agreed with your points, I hate to have my internet provider to have it's lines down one day while I am playing my game that requires me to play online for single player. Oh shit. lol