OMGIllithan said:
IndianaJonny said:
I feel like the best way to debate this is to share my thoughts on how DRM should function. I believe that a developer has a right to attempt to protect people from illegally downloading their games. I do, however, believe that a developer has an obligation to make whatever form of DRM they choose to be as unintrusive as possible.
Now with that said, I don't believe battle.net is an attempt to slap DRM onto games. It was created with the purpose of linking all blizzard games together. It also comes with the benefit of being able to download your games anywhere at any time from a browser. You can also communicate with friends across games. In short, it makes the playing experience better for everything that has been released from Blizzard since its release so far. Now the reason why they require an always on connection is because they decided not to have a separate single and multi player account, which I think is the heart of this issue, but they did give reasons why they made this decision. My point is that battle.net was not created with the purpose of being DRM, but that happened to be a secondary side effect. And I'm ok with that because its presented with so many positives along with it. This part, I'm sure some people will disagree with.
As far as you feeling like you're being charged an 'anti-piracy subscription fee', I'm not quite sure I understand that viewpoint. You're not being charged any extra to play the game at all, unless for some reason you were neglecting purchasing an internet connection until this game comes out.
Last, as far as balance and cheating goes, you're right that there will always be people trying to hack and cheat. However if we use wow for comparison, cheating is handled rather efficiently in wow (and even SC2), and I'm sure Blizzard has learned at this point techniques on how to track the people who are cheating so they are banned quickly. I am not a fan of the "Don't stop them because they'll do it anyways" argument. It only holds any weight because of the anonymity of the internet because people are afraid to stand up to those who want to watch the world burn.
P.S. Thanks for reading that post I made, I put a lot of time and effort into it hoping to persuade people to think more positively.
For sure.
busters made the astute obrservation on another D3 thread that Blizzard's (marketing) approach seems markedly similar to that of an MMO. If they're looking to build a game that relies heavily on a regulated, well-monitored online community for its continued popularity then, yes, they should be looking at successes such as
Starcraft and WoW as their frame of reference. But to build that community forcibly by making the game's community exclusively online is not something I can agree with, especially when the previous, successful,
Diablo games at least gave the option of offline play. An 'option' that, for some of us, was the reason we purchased the game in the first place.
And I make no apology that this view is really born of my own experiences of
Diablo and the nature of my interactions with the games. Whilst I never played online with strangers I had many a long session either on single-player offline or over LAN with all my mates crammed into my room at university. That's what the
Diablo experience was for me; without the need for, or cost of, any Internet access (unless we were looking up builds!). The 'anti-piracy subscription fee' was a remark as to the cost of using the Internet over a period where I wouldn't normally be online (e.g. when playing
Diablo), this can be both financial and qualitative, especially for ISPs who drop speeds after you've passed a certain threshold (which, in gaming/video-streaming households, is often reached.....sooner than expected). Granted Blizzard isn't making money directly from this (though you are spending more time on their 'shop-floor', as it were) but more money is still going out of the household finances at the end of the month.
I accept that DRM, either as intentional or circumstantial, is not going to go away, for, as you quite rightly point out, it has the potential to do much good - I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. But in its current format and utility by Blizzard, on this occasion I feel its doing more harm than good by clunking all its buyers over the head.
Though I admire Blizzard for at least testing the water (even if they did use such a beloved franchise as the sacrificial lamb). In a few years, I hope we'll have a sleek DRM system molded by user feedback and suited to user purpose rather than the draconian bulldozer it currently is, and D3, for better or worse, will have been a stepping stone in its evolution. Till then, "I do not agree with what Blizzard has to say, but I'll defend to the death their right to say it".
P.S. It was hard to find a post where you'd laid all your cards on the table on this matter as most of them seemed to be responses to other posters. And yeah, you didn't disappoint; plenty of heart in that post.
