Blizzard Defends Always-Online For Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

[Easton Dark]

Oh, okay. So, it's not a matter that people were promised things that didn't happen, it's just that they BOUGHT THE WRONG GAME. Sorry, folks! Should have just gotten something else. Maybe Path of Exile? Torchlight?

Mystery solved! Everybody go home now.

Don't both those games also require internet? They may not be the best examples

No, Torchlight doesn't require internet.

That's why people recommend it as the Diablo successor.

 

[spartandude]

Ok so people are talking about how being online is a good way to stop hackers and yes it is but i still dont get why you cant have on online work just as it does now and also and offline/LAN (if blizzard get over their hatred of LAN, could someone explain it to me?). But why cant they have an online version thats works just as it does right now, so you have to go through the servers to play and as such they can make sure everything is as its supposed to be and block any thing hacked, but then also have an offline version where they just say "ok ruin it for yourself if you want."

 

[Nazulu]

Snap for quickness

I don't know what you mean by hopeless because the punishments do reach those people and effect their gaming. Yeah, they'll keep on coming and other people will keep making it more difficult for them, it's always been like that. So you're saying they should just give up and make more restrictions? That's a really pathetic way to go about it, really.

It has nothing to do with winning, just providing the best experience you can, and shutting people out of a classic franchise is a dick head move. They should have come up with something else and not rely on the damn title if they want to focus on online only. How many classic games are you not considering that had both single player and online play? I had amazing experiences with all of them and not once did someone say "I wish these games didn't have a single player option".

the "deleting something that has been a part of the series" holds no weight whatsoever. A good sequel is one that "innovates" on the concepts of it's predecessors and brings new ideas to the table. A bad sequel is one that just does whatever it's predecessor does while wearing a new costume.

YOU find no weight in it, and it pretty makes your point weightless as well. Also, your description of a good sequel doesn't make any sense. All those classic games did innovate and really expanded, but I'm guessing you mean adding more restrictions counts as innovation. Also, not every sequel needs to innovate, and that's because some things were close to perfect already, so changing how the system works is not exactly innovation either.

 

[llubtoille]

They couldn't have made two buttons on the menu, one that said "Online" and another that said "Offline." That would have been too hard. It would have been too hard to allow people to level up on the single player content than allow them to jump in to online mode. It would have been too hard. Nah, they were just lazy, and in love with DRM.

If you mean that it would have been to hard for them to let you take that offline character and play it in online mode without utterly destroying the online economy, then yes it would have been all but impossible.

However if you mean it would have been to hard for them to allow you to play a character offline, then hop online and play your 'online only' characters - like D2, then no it wouldn't have been too hard for a company of their caliber.

I don't know whether it was their 'love of drm' (to prevent piracy) that inspires them, or perhaps they truly do believe that it's better for the consumer to make all their games connected through battle.net, but in either case it seems they've made their decision and are sticking with it.
Another thought is, perhaps this is their way of selling more console copies for those who have it on PC but are willing to pay again for the offline experience.

 

[Strazdas]

There has to have been a better solution than forcing everyone to be online all the time though. I find it hard to believe that in the many years Diablo 3 was in development they couldn't have come up with something that allowed offline play and a hack free online play.

Well, if you find that solution, I'm sure Blizz would love to know. The thing is though, there isn't a comparable game out there that has both an offline mode and a hack free online mode. Hell, you could probably go as far as to apply that to the video games industry as a whole.

do calcualtion online. servers can handle mahematics now.

You can't though, not if you want to give people a purely offline mode.

No comparable game? How about every single game with an multiplayer excluding the "hacked" ones? there are plenty of ways to prevent hacking in multiplayer without restricting singleplayer.
Yes, you can do server calcualtions and give people offline mode. When you play offline, everything is calcualted locally. When you go online, a different version of client starts that do calcualtion on the server. If a person cracks that client, he will see it differently, however the server will still only accept correct calcualtion steps and broadcast the results to everyone else, thus the only game the hacker changes is his own, and since server still takes the upper hand - likely make it worse. Meanwhile for everyone else he looks like albeit strange acting another player.
A good example of how this works is World of Tanks. There are no hackers, because server calculates everything. how it calculates is KNOWN, however they can do nothing about it since they would need to hack the main server for it. Worst they can do is change colors in their games via mod engine, which makes enemies more visible or highlights their bullet paths, ect.

BattleNet protects them from millions of dollars in lost sales.

Does it?
How.

Well you weren't writing in to tell him that you appreciated it. It's easy to see how a person whose job it was was to study the negative response that the company got for a feature would be forgiven for forgetting that they're only looking at the negative responses.

So i should write in to a company prasiing it to include basic functionality that should be a standart given thing in any game? we really gone that far now?

Yeah, let's ignore the fact that it's been what -several months?- and the pirates haven't even gotten a cracked version working that isn't based off the old beta. I'm sure they'll add that feature to the crack they haven't made annnnyyy day now!

Do tell me how does one crack a MMO? Because make no mistake, Diablo 3 is a MMO.

I believe you're missing the idea of how offline manipulating of characters works. Either you can create impossible situations (characters/items that could not have the stats they claim to) or improbable situations (you have all of the best gear and every slot in your inventory is also the best gear).

Impossible just requires validation. Improbable is the task we are trying to solve.

Digital signatures by themselves would not be good enough for the stated reason: you just need to find the private key in the game which has to be on ones computer to actually sign the file.

And? I dont see whats bad about people creating impsosible chracters in thier offline game. Online? Yeah, server will just still act like their character is what they actually are and the only change will be on thier own screens.
I never said digital signature is a solution, that was another person, and i agree that digital signatures are not enough. However id love digital signatures and their ban to be the new IP ban thing, because IP is too easy to fake and you get same guy joining the server every 5 minuets getting banned for spamming hacklinks or something. At least with digital signature it would take much more effort to do that.

And yet, the console versions exist...

That's different. Because...Ummm...Reasons.

COnsole version was made by different studio so technically "not them".

Don't both those games also require internet? They may not be the best examples

I dont know about paths of exhile, but i know torchlight definitely has an offline mode.

A friend of mine was trying to login, and every error he got he immediatly tried to login again and again and again and I said to him "You know you're only making the problem worse when you do that, right?"

They let you do that? Oh my.....
The games i played where a daily restart would make 50.000 logins right after it happen or their organized "Test servers" that gives people sneak peak into new version that would have half the community on at once, those had a different system.
failed to login, try again. failed again, you cannot try for 30 seconds. the more tries, the longer the time. thing is, those things dont really happen anymore because they got faster servers now, but they wouldnt let themselves be spammed. the client would hold for half a minute at least. of course you can hack the client to not do that, but then you may just as well LOIC the thing and youll have better results.

The only way that would turn out any way other than what happened in Diablo 2 would be to code the offline version completely different to the online version. Which in turn makes the production costs skyrocket, but we'd all be happy to pay $120-160 for the base game right?

Except that it wont. all you need is to insert a minimalistic calculation response server and trick the offline mode into "connecting" back to the actual offline files. you dont even need to register a server with the OS really, jut run a secondary exe.

Diablo 2 did this, it was also filled with hacks. The hacks I'm talking about aren't hex editors and the like that edit you character's stats. They are stuff like map hacks, making your movement become teleports, duping, forcing people to drop their gear etc.

Which shows poor implementation of online mode and smells more like "multiplayer mod" for san andreas games that did all calculations locally rather than anything else. BUt that was 2001 and online gaming was in its infancy so thats kinda understandable. they wouldnt be doing it similarly nowadays anyway. I mean back then servers couldnt handle all the calculations probably anyway, now they can.

Yeah, with any online game people will find a way to cheat through the system, but they can make that very risky by making everybody able to report those who break the rules, especially when you can record games easily now as evidence.

Competetive + ability to report = lets report people we dont like.
replay recordings are of course better solution, but you still need manpower to deal with it.

I've played many MMO's and they had their ways to track bots and hackers, and these people were eventually caught. Even the farmers in L2 who took very careful precautions making money by selling in game money were found at some point, the patterns of how certain people played made it obvious over time as well.

Ive played many MMOs and the only ones that had no hackers were those that made all calculations server-based. yes, if you make 20 money farmers run on your background and one of them gets caught once in 6 months and recieve a 1 month ban after which you just create new character and you call that "all geting caught eventually", then yes they do. but not in any timely fashion.

To be honest the only way to stop online gold sellers is to make the game not be pay to win.

I don't know what you mean by hopeless because the punishments do reach those people and effect their gaming. Yeah, they'll keep on coming and other people will keep making it more difficult for them, it's always been like that. So you're saying they should just give up and make more restrictions? That's a really pathetic way to go about it, really.

I will not name character or game for obviuos reasons but i was botting in one game for over 4 years, never been caught even though multiple people claimed to have reported me. as long as the botter has basic common sense (like not bot 24/7) he wont get caught. I never sold the chracter or anything, the game was very grindy and i just watched movies while it grinded on its own and only played the fun parts.

 

[Nazulu]

Hope you don't mind the snip. It's for all three quotes.

Your right, there will always be people who will abuse any system, but it can work out. I know someone that botted only once in a certain MMO and he was banned straight away, we don't even know how he was caught. Hell, there was a popular money trading site for Lineage 2 once and it was torn down eventually and most if not all their accounts were banned, some of these characters going up to level 70 which took forever to get to. Also, if they forgot to cover up their IP Address, it was even worse for them.

I'm not sure why you're telling me this, but no matter what, I still had a great 'fair' time with many people even knowing there were cheaters, and so I still don't care for Kevin's 'excuse'.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

If you mean that it would have been to hard for them to let you take that offline character and play it in online mode without utterly destroying the online economy, then yes it would have been all but impossible.

The online economy destroyed itself without any help from my suggestion.

 

[Aeshi]

there are plenty of ways to prevent hacking in multiplayer without restricting singleplayer.

Yeah, too bad none of them work for more than a week (feeling generous)

Yes, you can do server calcualtions and give people offline mode. When you play offline, everything is calcualted locally. When you go online, a different version of client starts that do calcualtion on the server. If a person cracks that client, he will see it differently, however the server will still only accept correct calcualtion steps and broadcast the results to everyone else, thus the only game the hacker changes is his own, and since server still takes the upper hand - likely make it worse. Meanwhile for everyone else he looks like albeit strange acting another player.

A good example of how this works is World of Tanks. There are no hackers, because server calculates everything. how it calculates is KNOWN, however they can do nothing about it since they would need to hack the main server for it. Worst they can do is change colors in their games via mod engine, which makes enemies more visible or highlights their bullet paths, ect.

Yeah, WoT has no hackers, and you can go singleplayer with if you-Oh wait. No you can't!

WoT has no hackers, it also happens to be always-online by virtue of having no singleplayer. Kind of like D3 in that regard. I'm willing to bet that altering either to allow for offline mode would cause their "hack-free" position to last for 5 seconds after making said change.

Do tell me how does one crack a MMO? Because make no mistake, Diablo 3 is a MMO.

That was my point. I was saying that Pirates haven't managed to crack it yet, so expecting a single-player crack is deluding yourself by this point. Can you not detect sarcasm or something?

Competetive + ability to report = lets report people we dont like.
replay recordings are of course better solution, but you still need manpower to deal with it.

Because DOTA2 proved that sort of feature nnnnneeever gets exploited by sore losers, right?

 

[Strazdas]

Hope you don't mind the snip. It's for all three quotes.

Your right, there will always be people who will abuse any system, but it can work out. I know someone that botted only once in a certain MMO and he was banned straight away, we don't even know how he was caught. Hell, there was a popular money trading site for Lineage 2 once and it was torn down eventually and most if not all their accounts were banned, some of these characters going up to level 70 which took forever to get to. Also, if they forgot to cover up their IP Address, it was even worse for them.

I'm not sure why you're telling me this, but no matter what, I still had a great 'fair' time with many people even knowing there were cheaters, and so I still don't care for Kevin's 'excuse'.

theres definitely a fair time to be had in MMO. but that does not mean that system is self regulatory. Lt it run lnog enough and you will end up with Tibia - over 95% of population is using a bot and not even hiding it.
I guess your somone got really unlucky or od like to know the name of that game.

Thing with money sites are, those are actually illegal. Botting is not illegal, hence worse they can do is ban your account. Now i havent played L2 in forever, but i didnt remember it being hard to level. If anything levels came faster than i expected and i ended up killing too low level monsters jsut by trying to finnish a quest most of the time.

Yeah, too bad none of them work for more than a week (feeling generous)

Except they do. There are games that dont have hackers you know.

Yeah, WoT has no hackers, and you can go singleplayer with if you-Oh wait. No you can't!

WoT has no hackers, it also happens to be always-online by virtue of having no singleplayer. Kind of like D3 in that regard. I'm willing to bet that altering either to allow for offline mode would cause their "hack-free" position to last for 5 seconds after making said change.

WoT is an example of well executed online mode. Which is what i was pointing to. It would not have hackers of there was a singleplayer mode due to virtue of how multiplayer works. nothing you do locally can affect the actual gameplay for anyone but you.

That was my point. I was saying that Pirates haven't managed to crack it yet, so expecting a single-player crack is deluding yourself by this point. Can you not detect sarcasm or something?

So then all games have to be MMOs. yeah, thats unworkable.

Because DOTA2 proved that sort of feature nnnnneeever gets exploited by sore losers, right?

I never said it doesnt get expoited, quite the opposite.

 

[Nazulu]

I can't believe I'm finally talking to someone who's played Lineage 2 here. Were you there at the beginning before chronicle 1? It was really crazy then. Especially when I first died by 2 guys named Fuck and You. lol

I didn't bot in Lineage 2 so maybe that's why it felt like a long time to level sometimes. I mostly worked with a big clan and sometimes it took them awhile to get there shit together.

Hope you don't mind the snip. It's for all three quotes.

Your right, there will always be people who will abuse any system, but it can work out. I know someone that botted only once in a certain MMO and he was banned straight away, we don't even know how he was caught. Hell, there was a popular money trading site for Lineage 2 once and it was torn down eventually and most if not all their accounts were banned, some of these characters going up to level 70 which took forever to get to. Also, if they forgot to cover up their IP Address, it was even worse for them.

I'm not sure why you're telling me this, but no matter what, I still had a great 'fair' time with many people even knowing there were cheaters, and so I still don't care for Kevin's 'excuse'.

theres definitely a fair time to be had in MMO. but that does not mean that system is self regulatory. Lt it run lnog enough and you will end up with Tibia - over 95% of population is using a bot and not even hiding it.
I guess your somone got really unlucky or od like to know the name of that game.

Thing with money sites are, those are actually illegal. Botting is not illegal, hence worse they can do is ban your account. Now i havent played L2 in forever, but i didnt remember it being hard to level. If anything levels came faster than i expected and i ended up killing too low level monsters jsut by trying to finnish a quest most of the time.

I get the gist of your post, just some little things I don't understand. What is Lt and Tibia?

I guess your somone got really unlucky or od like to know the name of that game.

I don't completely get this either.

 

[Schmeiser]

Am i missing something here? I mean im really confused. People are talking about people hacking their SP game then transfering that hacked char into online and ruining everyone's experience. I'm not a tech wizard or a game dev but what's wrong with making an offline mode and a online mode, THEN not allowing offline chars to be played online and THEN not allowing online chars played offline aswell. Is that possible? Because i sure as hell do think it is possible, so hack your own game who gives a fuck, you can only play solo anyway. So we make both communities happy, i would buy d3 instantly if it had a offline mode, i couldn't give a rats ass if i can't play my offline char online. It's not hard to lvl multiple chars.

So much drama in this thread

 

[spartandude]

Oh, okay. So, it's not a matter that people were promised things that didn't happen, it's just that they BOUGHT THE WRONG GAME. Sorry, folks! Should have just gotten something else. Maybe Path of Exile? Torchlight?

Mystery solved! Everybody go home now.

Don't both those games also require internet? They may not be the best examples

Don't know about Path of Exile (never heard of it til now) but i can safely say that you dont need to be connected to play Torchlight 1 or 2 at all.

Am i missing something here? I mean im really confused. People are talking about people hacking their SP game then transfering that hacked char into online and ruining everyone's experience. I'm not a tech wizard or a game dev but what's wrong with making an offline mode and a online mode, THEN not allowing offline chars to be played online and THEN not allowing online chars played offline aswell. Is that possible? Because i sure as hell do think it is possible, so hack your own game who gives a fuck, you can only play solo anyway. So we make both communities happy, i would buy d3 instantly if it had a offline mode, i couldn't give a rats ass if i can't play my offline char online. It's not hard to lvl multiple chars.

So much drama in this thread

I completely agree with this post

 

[Nemu]

Blizzard, this time around, sure knew us better than we know ourselves.
They were asked about offline D3 and a Vanilla WoW server and in both cases, THEY knew what the fans wanted, not the thousands (millions?) of folks clamoring for gaming days gone by.

I daresay that the devs were more smug than usual this year, which is curious, considering how D3 is considered a misstep and they are down five million active accounts since it's peak a handful of years ago (my two accounts included, I played for nearly nine years). WoD had better be a hit, because the past two expansions have been BIG disappointments.

 

[Weaver]

Glad I didn't buy diablo 3.

Why can the console version be offline but the PC version can't if being online is the most important thing in the world, by the way?

 

[black_knight1337]

I don't know what you mean by hopeless because the punishments do reach those people and effect their gaming. Yeah, they'll keep on coming and other people will keep making it more difficult for them, it's always been like that. So you're saying they should just give up and make more restrictions? That's a really pathetic way to go about it, really.

By hopeless I was referring to the fact that it's impossible to just outright stop hackers. Given enough time and effort they can work their way into anything. And no, I'm not saying they should "give up and make more restrictions", that's just silly. What I'm saying is that Blizzard saw a problem with the way it was done in Diablo 2 and they wanted to provide a solution. They saw always online as both the cheapest and most effective solution so they went with it. Of course they could have spent years and years researching and developing other solutions for it but that would kill their profit margins. And they are a business after all, just like everyone else.

It has nothing to do with winning, just providing the best experience you can, and shutting people out of a classic franchise is a dick head move. They should have come up with something else and not rely on the damn title if they want to focus on online only. How many classic games are you not considering that had both single player and online play? I had amazing experiences with all of them and not once did someone say "I wish these games didn't have a single player option".

Yes, it's about providing a good experience for users and hackers diminish that experience. And what? Just because of a change in the drm they have to create a whole new IP? "Hey guys we're working on a new arpg that works much like our much loved title, Diablo 2, but because of a change in the way the content is going to be delivered we can't call it a sequel but rather a spiritual successor." Whelp, I guess you have to go after countless other titles now spouting that same nonsense.

I really don't think you're getting it. It's not "lets remove the offline mode" but rather "lets do what we can to stop hackers". There are other reasons but that's the one relevant to this discussion.

YOU find no weight in it, and it pretty makes your point weightless as well. Also, your description of a good sequel doesn't make any sense. All those classic games did innovate and really expanded, but I'm guessing you mean adding more restrictions counts as innovation. Also, not every sequel needs to innovate, and that's because some things were close to perfect already, so changing how the system works is not exactly innovation either.

I never said they didn't, never even touched upon the quality of "those classic games". Your argument was 'it's in this game so it has to be in it's sequel' which is just bs reasoning. Sequels need to stick to their roots of course but there's no reason why they can't remove, change, expand or add to it. In fact, sequels should be doing this, otherwise everything will end up like CoD but that's what you want isn't it. And "changing how the systems works" is pretty much the definition of innovation ("make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products").

No comparable game? How about every single game with an multiplayer excluding the "hacked" ones? there are plenty of ways to prevent hacking in multiplayer without restricting singleplayer.

So name some?

Yes, you can do server calcualtions and give people offline mode. When you play offline, everything is calcualted locally. When you go online, a different version of client starts that do calcualtion on the server. If a person cracks that client, he will see it differently, however the server will still only accept correct calcualtion steps and broadcast the results to everyone else, thus the only game the hacker changes is his own, and since server still takes the upper hand - likely make it worse. Meanwhile for everyone else he looks like albeit strange acting another player.

Like I said to someone before, those are not the kind of hacks I'm talking about. Simply storing the characters online prevents that kind of thing. The hacks I'm talking about include things like duping and map hacks. If you provide players with an offline mode without recoding the entire thing(forcing production costs skyward) then these kind of things will always happen.

A good example of how this works is World of Tanks. There are no hackers, because server calculates everything. how it calculates is KNOWN, however they can do nothing about it since they would need to hack the main server for it. Worst they can do is change colors in their games via mod engine, which makes enemies more visible or highlights their bullet paths, ect.

Big problem with your example. It's a mmo. Mmos are purely online, hence why that kind of security is possible. Diablo 3 employs the same kind of methods.

Except that it wont. all you need is to insert a minimalistic calculation response server and trick the offline mode into "connecting" back to the actual offline files. you dont even need to register a server with the OS really, jut run a secondary exe.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, care to clarify? Is this for the online variant or the offline one? I'm thinking it's the offline one. If so you aren't solving any of the issues. You're still giving the player access to code which compromises the security of the online variant. To keep the online variant secure it needs to be significantly different from the offline variant. At the very least the programming team would pretty much double which of course pushes up development costs forcing higher prices or lower margins per copy.

 

[Nazulu]

I don't know what you mean by hopeless because the punishments do reach those people and effect their gaming. Yeah, they'll keep on coming and other people will keep making it more difficult for them, it's always been like that. So you're saying they should just give up and make more restrictions? That's a really pathetic way to go about it, really.

By hopeless I was referring to the fact that it's impossible to just outright stop hackers. Given enough time and effort they can work their way into anything. And no, I'm not saying they should "give up and make more restrictions", that's just silly. What I'm saying is that Blizzard saw a problem with the way it was done in Diablo 2 and they wanted to provide a solution. They saw always online as both the cheapest and most effective solution so they went with it. Of course they could have spent years and years researching and developing other solutions for it but that would kill their profit margins. And they are a business after all, just like everyone else.

It has nothing to do with winning, just providing the best experience you can, and shutting people out of a classic franchise is a dick head move. They should have come up with something else and not rely on the damn title if they want to focus on online only. How many classic games are you not considering that had both single player and online play? I had amazing experiences with all of them and not once did someone say "I wish these games didn't have a single player option".

Yes, it's about providing a good experience for users and hackers diminish that experience. And what? Just because of a change in the drm they have to create a whole new IP? "Hey guys we're working on a new arpg that works much like our much loved title, Diablo 2, but because of a change in the way the content is going to be delivered we can't call it a sequel but rather a spiritual successor." Whelp, I guess you have to go after countless other titles now spouting that same nonsense.

I really don't think you're getting it. It's not "lets remove the offline mode" but rather "lets do what we can to stop hackers". There are other reasons but that's the one relevant to this discussion.

YOU find no weight in it, and it pretty makes your point weightless as well. Also, your description of a good sequel doesn't make any sense. All those classic games did innovate and really expanded, but I'm guessing you mean adding more restrictions counts as innovation. Also, not every sequel needs to innovate, and that's because some things were close to perfect already, so changing how the system works is not exactly innovation either.

I never said they didn't, never even touched upon the quality of "those classic games". Your argument was 'it's in this game so it has to be in it's sequel' which is just bs reasoning. Sequels need to stick to their roots of course but there's no reason why they can't remove, change, expand or add to it. In fact, sequels should be doing this, otherwise everything will end up like CoD but that's what you want isn't it. And "changing how the systems works" is pretty much the definition of innovation ("make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products").

Yeah, we're just going in circles now, and I'm sure we could keep this up for awhile.

Also you keep saying that is 'bullshit reasoning' and 'nonsense' yet it's not to me at all, so you can see where I see there is no point in you telling me that. It's not like you prove anything by saying that and that's why this is useless.

I'll leave it at this. I can avoid hackers and usually I won't see them either. I can not work around the DRM though, so if my internet or their servers are not doing so well... you've already heard how that's turned out for some games. It's very clear to me after all the games I've played with both options that hackers shouldn't result in restrictions, they aren't the end of the world.

Also, if you're going to continue a franchise with many fans that loved the previous games, you can bet your ass that removing options or drastically changing it to another game is a shallow move, usually to follow trends to make a quick money grab. Fuck this new Blizzard, I bet they'd get nothing if they started a new franchise.

 

[black_knight1337]

Yeah, we're just going in circles now, and I'm sure we could keep this up for awhile.

Also you keep saying that is 'bullshit reasoning' and 'nonsense' yet it's not to me at all, so you can see where I see there is no point in you telling me that. It's not like you prove anything by saying that and that's why this is useless.

Yeah. And fair enough, although there are a number of other points there.

I'll leave it at this. I can avoid hackers and usually I won't see them either. I can not work around the DRM though, so if my internet or their servers are not doing so well... you've already heard how that's turned out for some games. It's very clear to me after all the games I've played with both options that hackers shouldn't result in restrictions, they aren't the end of the world.

I'll leave it at this. Hackers are a detriment to any online game. If you want to protect people from the harm caused by them and at the same time stop them profiting, you all but have to use always online drm. Other methods are probably achievable but not without causing costs to head skyward. Thankfully though, Blizzard have done a pretty good job with their implementation keeping latency as low as they can(It's AT&T that's the problem), providing a solid integration and keeping the game hack free.

Also, if you're going to continue a franchise with many fans that loved the previous games, you can bet your ass that removing options or drastically changing it to another game is a shallow move, usually to follow trends to make a quick money grab. Fuck this new Blizzard, I bet they'd get nothing if they started a new franchise.

I agree although I don't agree that that is what Blizzard have done with Diablo 3. It is still the same PvE loot-driven arpg it has always been. The changes made have been a mixed bag but overall(and what's been shown of upcoming content) it has been good and is heading in the right direction.

 

[Lovely Mixture]

I'll leave it at this. Hackers are a detriment to any online game. If you want to protect people from the harm caused by them and at the same time stop them profiting, you all but have to use always online drm. Other methods are probably achievable but not without causing costs to head skyward.

You need online security for when you play online. Anything other than that is stupid and inconvenient.