Blizzard CEO Responds to Diablo III Controversy

Azuaron

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Fronzel said:
I fully understand the desire to play Diablo III offline," Morhaime said, "however, Diablo III was designed from the beginning to be an online game that can be enjoyed with friends, and the always-online requirement is the best way for us to support that design.
Yeah, no.
Tiamattt said:
If the game "was designed from the beginning to be an online game that can be enjoyed with friends" then how come it's more beneficial and in a lot of ppl's opinions more fun to solo? Seriously give us good reasons to party up rather then having a list of drawbacks to deal with and maybe that reason would have some merit.
canadamus_prime said:
How difficult would it be for them to make it so you only have to sign on to Battle.net when you want to access all that multiplayer stuff like the Auction House, Friends lists, Public games, chat, etc. etc. So if you don't want to use any of that stuff, you don't have to be signed into Battle.net. Would it be that hard for them to do that? Seriously I want to know.
Diablo III was originally planned to be a straight-up MMO. This got scrapped a few years into development, but, by that point, they probably figured it would be too much work to add in an isolated offline single-player campaign, particularly since they totally want everyone using the RMAH which you couldn't do with an offline character. ('Cause they totally do want your money, no matter what he's saying right now.)

Further, back then DRM wasn't as big of an issue as it has been since SecuROM, and they probably were thinking that everyone was going to have internet anyway, so what's the big deal?

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if they had a team working on offline single-player, but having put no work into it and with the bugs that have been cropping up, they just haven't been able to get it out the door.
 
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One other common topic we?ve seen in the forums is the always-connected experience, and the perception that the online requirement is nothing but an ineffective form of copy protection that has already been cracked. While we?ve never said that this requirement guarantees that there will be no cheating or game cracks, it does help us battle those problems (we have not found any fully functional cracks). More important to us is that the online requirement is critical for the long-term integrity of the game experience. I fully understand the desire to play Diablo III offline; however, Diablo III was designed from the beginning to be an online game that can be enjoyed with friends, and the always-online requirement is the best way for us to support that design. The effectiveness of the online elements -- including the friends list and cross-game communication; co-op matchmaking; persistent characters that you can use by yourself, with others, and in PvP; and some of our customer support, service, and security components -- is tied directly to the online nature of the game. These and other online-enabled features are essential to our design for Diablo III. That said, there are still improvements we believe we can make to expand the online experience and make co-op play even more rewarding, and this will remain one of our priorities moving forward. Overall, while there are some downsides to the online-only approach, I still believe this was the best long-term decision for the game.
In other words: "We're right, the customer is wrong. Play our way or GTFO."

Seriously, they just completely dodged the issue. I've seen MANY games that were meant to be played online turn out to be a success because of offline play. Phantasy Star Online for the Gamecube comes to mind. So how about you let us play our way because you can't design for everyone?
 

Canadamus Prime

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Azuaron said:
canadamus_prime said:
How difficult would it be for them to make it so you only have to sign on to Battle.net when you want to access all that multiplayer stuff like the Auction House, Friends lists, Public games, chat, etc. etc. So if you don't want to use any of that stuff, you don't have to be signed into Battle.net. Would it be that hard for them to do that? Seriously I want to know.
Diablo III was originally planned to be a straight-up MMO. This got scrapped a few years into development, but, by that point, they probably figured it would be too much work to add in an isolated offline single-player campaign, particularly since they totally want everyone using the RMAH which you couldn't do with an offline character. ('Cause they totally do want your money, no matter what he's saying right now.)

Further, back then DRM wasn't as big of an issue as it has been since SecuROM, and they probably were thinking that everyone was going to have internet anyway, so what's the big deal?

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if they had a team working on offline single-player, but having put no work into it and with the bugs that have been cropping up, they just haven't been able to get it out the door.
I'm aware of that. My question is, why do they need to have an isolated single player campaign? Why not have it exactly like it is now, except only have the login prompt come up if you try to use any of the features that require Battle.net (RMAH, Chat, Friends list etc.). Or have a button on the character select screen that says "Login to Battle.net"
 

Tradjus

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I really, really hate when someone sets out to apologize for problems, but comes off as a self-congratulatory douche. Seriously, doesn't anyone read these before they go out for public viewing? Wasn't there at least one person at the top of the corporate ladder who had the good sense to understand that this would only irritate, or worse, enrage everyone who had these problems with Diablo 3? Are they seriously so disconnected from reality, that when this open letter was looked over, they said "YARP, DAT LUKS LEIK IT'LL WURK! THEY GONNA LURVE DIS!"
It's incomprehensible to me how people can be so highly paid yet be so utterly ineffectual at doing what they're supposed to do.
 

Saulkar

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Until an offline singleplayer option is available then it is a no-go for me. I have a 5MB internet connection but it drops every hour or so for a second at the most. What this means is simply refreshing a loading youtube video and such, does not appear to affect downloads in anyway from any source, no hassles. However this also means that I constantly get booted from multiplayer games and my brother who owns Diablo III constantly loses connection. (What happens at that point I am not sure of since I never asked him but if the swearing is any indicator)
 

Azuaron

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canadamus_prime said:
I'm aware of that. My question is, why do they need to have an isolated single player campaign? Why not have it exactly like it is now, except only have the login prompt come up if you try to use any of the features that require Battle.net (RMAH, Chat, Friends list etc.). Or have a button on the character select screen that says "Login to Battle.net"
They would have to isolate "offline" characters from "online" characters, just as they did with Diablo II, to prevent character tampering, item modding, gold spawning, etc. from working its way into the online ecosystem.

Your character? Not stored on your computer. Blizzard has that character on a server, and you can't touch it except by logging in through their system.
 

antipunt

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Morhaime dismissed the notion that Diablo III's online-only state is solely about copy-protection, but that keeping the game online is more effective than allowing for offline options.
...
LOL!
heh..hhahah

HAHAHAHAHHAAH
..

no
 

RJ 17

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Nov 27, 2011
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NameIsRobertPaulson said:
No one defending Blizzard yet? Huh. The zealots are usually in full force by now. In b4 Aeshi.
Honestly, I'm kinda hoping that the Blizzard Zealots have gone the way of the dodo bird. I used to love Blizzard, I served my time in the digital prison known as WoW, playing it from launch until the end of BC. Eventually grew tired of it and decided to call it quits. I enjoyed my time and didn't "rage quit" the game, just felt it was time to move on.

What REALLY shattered any faith I had with Blizzard was SC II. Like many, I eagerly waited over a decade for SC II to come out, checking the site for updated information after the game was finally announced. Then I saw the news update to which there is no middle finger big enough that I can wave in the direction of anyone affiliated with Blizzard: "Yeah, you know this game that you've been waiting over a decade for? Yeah, well we're going to be splitting it into 3 games now. No, it certainly isn't an attempt to use your zealous fandom for the franchise to make you willing to pay 3 times for a single game, heavens no. We just can't fit everything we want to do with the game onto one disc!" I call bullshit on that notion, first and foremost. But beyond that..........what ever happened to the concept of putting out mutlipe-disc games? Would it have been THAT hard to make SC II a 3 disc game, one disc for each campaign? As such you wouldn't have to charge people a total of $180.00 to get the FULL game? "Well, the Zerg and Protoss campaigns are expansion sets!" No. No they're fucking not. That's utter and complete bullshit. WC II had a Horde and Human campaign. Beyond the Dark Portal had a Horde and Human campaign that EXPANDED off those in WC II. WC III had 4 campaigns, as did the expansion which *gasp* once again, EXPANDED on the previous stories. SC had 3 campaigns. Brood War EXPANDED on those 3 campaigns.

Wings of Liberty has.......on campaign...that, from what I've been told, was stuffed full of filler crap and could have really covered all the important info in about 10 missions (which is about the size of the campaigns in the original SC). Heart of the Swarm has....one campaign...it continues the story, but doesn't EXPAND on the previous campaign.

So any argument from Blizzard that they're not just a buncha greedy fucks is utter bullshit. "We wanted people who wanted to buy weapons to use our central location rather than going to 3rd party sources." translates to "If people are going to cheat and pay real money for weapons they didn't earn/find, we want them paying US and not 3rd party people." I haven't played D3 (or any Blizzard game since the end of Burning Crusade), but I imagine you can't go to the RMAH and say "I want the Battle Axe of Infinite Buttsecks. Here's $100.00, gimme gimme gimme!" unless said buttsecks battle axe is already on the AH.....in which case you have to wonder "Why not just use the game's fictional currency to buy the buttsecks battle axe?"
 

Octorok

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Oh, fuck off. I'm not even a Diablo 3 player, let alone a long-term Diablo fan and even I'm angry at this awful, awful mess.

It's half past midnight here, so I haven't the energy to give Blizzard the bollocking they deserve for all of their stupid problems (very much including this experiment in condescension, which at best treats its readers like morons and at worst lies to them outright), but I would love to see what a Blizzard rep would think of this thread.

"Hmm. A 100% unhappiness rating. People really loathe us for this."

"No no, don't say that. Say "feedback was passionate", "the most talked about game ending of all time", and that "we faced numerous challenges" blah blah blah I have no respect for customers and my game design choices are driven by my love for smoking actual hundred-dollar bills for sustenance."

Actually, put the customer to one side for a second. We've already covered in detail the many ways consumers are screwed over by this.

I actually feel sorry for the people who work at these companies who do love making games. People who pour their time and energy into making a game the best it can be, only to see a bunch of greasy suits fuck it all up with "broadening for mass-market appeal" and the like. Imagine seeing the creation of you and your friends turned into something hated and vilified based on decisions that were entirely out of your hands.

Oh, by the way, Mike Morhaime, if you're reading this - you're a liar, and you know it. I get that it's your job to lie to people, but seriously, get some respect for your customers. It might not be great PR, but at least angry Diablo fans are less likely to scratch up your car.

EDIT: A guy posted a translation of the letter, and it's bloody funny.

Dear Money,

Now that we've ignored your feedback for two months and we aren't making as much money on the RMAH as we hoped, I would like to take a step back and discuss how we can molest your wallets more effectively.

We've had an enormous amount of complaints since the launch. I speak for everyone at Blizzard when I say that you are loud and annoying and we hate you. We truly believe "Every Dollar Matters," so I want to thank you for sharing your experiences in an effort to help us figure out how to be more subtle in our gouging. Your money makes it possible for us to continue developing Brother Kotick's vision of a micro transaction utopia, and we never take that for granted.

The launch week of Diablo III was obviously a debacle. The positive was that we made nine-hundred trillion dollars, the not so positive is that you couldn't play the game. We were thrilled that Diablo III made all of the money ever (topping even our most recent debacle). We've been so floored by the response that we all took three week vacations in small island countries and bought BMWs with toilets built into the seats. Frank Little in accounting bought a lifetime subscription to Cherry Trees Weekly. Guy's weird.

The launch had many challenges, chief among those being our insistence on always-online, our inability to properly gauge demand, our logistical incompetence in meeting demand and our unwillingness to spend the money necessary to ensure that we only "double it" when it comes to untested game mechanics, never to hardware infrastructure. However, I do not wish to apologize for the misstep--after all, it wasn't us who crashed our servers for three days straight. You did that. We will do our absolute minimum to conquer this for future releases if we feel like it.

In response to the immediate and overwhelming demand for a faithful followup to Diablo II, the team did everything they should have done a month previous to allow players to play the game they paid for. Despite these efforts, you keep crashing our servers by your insistence on playing the game. Rather than address this directly, I'll just say that even as we work to drive you away from the game and into the less-hardware-intensive Auction Houses, it's a sure bet your hardcore characters will die from lag spikes and server outages. We hope that our actions in the past have demonstrated that above all else, we're committed to keeping you paying for anything we make, no matter how rotten and cynical it actually is. Have faith and you will be rewarded. With $5.

We are not satisfied with only making nine-hundred trillion dollars; we want people to continue paying for Blizzard games for a very long time. The Diablo III team has made a passable, lukewarm and aesthetically pleasing experience. As such, our teams are working hard to fill in the gaps with all sorts of ancillary stuff. Kind of like how the frog DNA in Jurassic Park filled in the gaps in the dinosaur DNA and caused the dinosaurs to spontaneously change sexes. This is why Diablo is a woman. Because of the frogs.

You've seen some of that work already in patch 1.0.3, and you'll see additional "improvements" with patch 1.0.4. On the game balance front, this update will contain changes designed to further treat this game like WoW. We know that the "2 trillion builds" we touted before launch was perhaps a bit optimistic, but we would realistically like to get that number up to five. Maybe six. Per class. Another topic we?ve seen actively discussed is the fact that better, more distinct Legendary items are needed. We agree. I have no explanation whatsoever for why legendary items have been useless for two whole months, but Patch 1.0.4 will include new and improved Legendary items that are more interesting, more powerful, and more epic in ways you probably (hopefully) won?t be expecting, like extra frost damage or reflects damage back at attacker.

We're also working on a number of features that already exist, such as chatting with your friends, joining their games and seeing their achievements. In addition, we will be constantly improving the auction house since we know that's like super duper important to you all. This is how your money is being used. Thought you should know.

Regarding the real-money auction house, our primary goal for including this in the game was to provide convenience and peace of mind for those players who might otherwise turn to third-party services to buy items. Unfortunately that goal got lost when the guy in charge of itemization, Ned, had a stroke and the part of his brain that makes game design decisions leaked out his ears and into his cereal. Also, Ned has a hard time eating cereal anymore because the brains made him sick. Pray for Ned, please.

Anyway, the RMAH was created to protect you. We needed to keep you safe from the big, scary black market sites that all of you would, of course, be going to for items you couldn't find in-game because of Ned and his bad choices. It was never our intention for you to feel like the auction house is mandatory, so stop feeling like that. What are you, an idiot? We did it for your own good! Now you understand and we can all move on together.

One other common topic we?ve seen in the forums is the always-connected experience, and the perception that the online requirement is nothing but an ineffective form of copy protection that has already been cracked. While we?ve never said that this requirement guarantees that there will be no cheating or game cracks, we did strongly imply it was necessary because of all the cheating and cracks in Diablo II. Seeing that cheating and cracks still exist, we would like to divert your attention to this cute bunny: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3XBUPZtl2hk/TkzFiB6HxgI/AAAAAAAAA_Q/z4rxNi333T0/s1600/cute+bunny+011.jpg.

Diablo III's always-connected requirement is necessary for, like, the integrity of the experience. If someone knows what that means, please email us. It's also necessary for us to support you playing with your friends (even if you don't have any), because we don't want you doing that yourself via a LAN. LANs are scary. A LAN once ate my friend. It's true. Look it up.

I know many of you are also looking forward to patch 1.1, our PvP update, which will come out in maybe 6 more months. We wouldn't want to just flip the switch and let people just attack each other. That would be a disaster! Instead, the PvP we're providing will provide a wonderful, controlled and constrained arena combat experience which will satisfy WoW players, which seems to be our primary demographic for some weird reason.

We're also doing some other things and stuff. It's going to be awesome. We can't give out any specifics but get excited!

As always, we pretend to care about your feedback and do whatever we want regardless. Just think of us as Congress. The Congress of Fun?, and Jay Wilson is Joe Biden. Suck on that!

Always yours my sweet, sugary doves,

Mike Morhaime
Link - http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/6146724759

EDIT 2 : Electric Boogaloo - Thread got deleted, since funny and legitimate criticism is obviously lies and propaganda put about by Communist Nazis to encourage the murder of baby pandas.

Glad I saved a copy, though. Hey, Blizzard Censorship Department (population 115,657), Come At Me Bros!
 

Comrade_Beric

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May 10, 2010
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...wow. Is there even a single non-blizzard-fanboy who is taken in by this? Really?

"Our launch wasn't shot to hell because we decided to keep the server count low knowing that the rush will wear off after a couple of weeks and didn't want to support the initial surge, it was because we were too ignorant of our own awesomeness to know people were going to buy it!"

"The auction house isn't meant to make us rich, honest! That's just an unintended side effect of us making a system where you can give us money to sell items to each other!"

"We don't keep the game always online because we want to force you to be close to our money-market or to force some DRM on you, it's just a way to make the game better... with lag!"

This letter is the most obnoxious case of "spin" I've seen since Southern US Whites began a revisionist campaign to relabel the civil war a "state's rights" (wink wink) struggle rather than a southern fight to protect slavery.
 

lancar

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Aug 11, 2009
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I knew what this statement would say even before I clicked the article link.

Really, the devs that actually admit they were wrong are extremely few and far between these days, and Blizzard certainly can never become one of them anymore since they merged with Activision (may their souls grow rashes that'll itch throughout their afterlives).

Ah, I remember the olden days when Blizzard was loved by all.
 

kortin

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More tears about Always Online DRM. Continue crying, friends, your tears sustain me.
 

Canadamus Prime

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Azuaron said:
canadamus_prime said:
I'm aware of that. My question is, why do they need to have an isolated single player campaign? Why not have it exactly like it is now, except only have the login prompt come up if you try to use any of the features that require Battle.net (RMAH, Chat, Friends list etc.). Or have a button on the character select screen that says "Login to Battle.net"
They would have to isolate "offline" characters from "online" characters, just as they did with Diablo II, to prevent character tampering, item modding, gold spawning, etc. from working its way into the online ecosystem.
Since I'm fairly certain all that stuff happens anyway, I have to ask "Why?"
Azuaron said:
Your character? Not stored on your computer. Blizzard has that character on a server, and you can't touch it except by logging in through their system.
And again, how difficult would it be to change that?
 

CD-R

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Nimzabaat said:
Yeah he acts like he's never played Diablo, or Diablo 2, or Starcraft, or Starcraft 2, or Warcraft, or Warcraft 2, or Warcraft 3... (just mentioning titles that you could play offline or online or in a LAN party (do people still do LAN parties? I know my friends wanted to) that worked just fine without always being online).

Sigh. I wish I had more money so everytime Blizzard made a stupid statement like this, I could buy another copy of The Witcher or The Witcher 2. CDProjekt has the right idea.
There are actually programs you can download that let you play lan over the internet. I can't be bothered to look them up though.
 

Futzpah

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Yikes ...I must be one of the rare people that thinks D3 really wasn't all that bad?

My only 2 beefs with the game is the normal level is like ...mid-level corporate manager fucking dimwittingly too easy. Oh yay, the game will actually be one step above "mouth breather skill" in Nightmare ....so I get to do it all over again.

The second one I'm over but the opening midnight release was a bummer. I expected some lag, or a long queue time but after an hour or so of attempted logs, I called it a night.

Overall though the game is enjoyable.
 

bfgmetalhead

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I am surprised they don't have a button on the diablo 3 login screen saying "Torranted version available here!" It would save people time.
 

Dogstile

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canadamus_prime said:
Azuaron said:
canadamus_prime said:
I'm aware of that. My question is, why do they need to have an isolated single player campaign? Why not have it exactly like it is now, except only have the login prompt come up if you try to use any of the features that require Battle.net (RMAH, Chat, Friends list etc.). Or have a button on the character select screen that says "Login to Battle.net"
They would have to isolate "offline" characters from "online" characters, just as they did with Diablo II, to prevent character tampering, item modding, gold spawning, etc. from working its way into the online ecosystem.
Since I'm fairly certain all that stuff happens anyway, I have to ask "Why?"
Azuaron said:
Your character? Not stored on your computer. Blizzard has that character on a server, and you can't touch it except by logging in through their system.
And again, how difficult would it be to change that?
I'll save you his response. Not much, all they have to do is change where the file saves to. They wanted to do this on purpose, you don't program a game this big from a company that big without meticulously planning it out.

Goddammit blizzard i'm onto you.