Seriously ? You think out of all the people on this planet, only I had the expection for the game to be playable while it's always online ? I also have a right to criticise what I think doesn't work in a game after handing out real money and not going through the process of pirating it over the net. That's in the list of everybody's rights after they have bought the game. Since the second option is preferably easier and a lot more affordable, people that invest in something like this deserve some courtesy. Which again, is something I am 100% sure that not only me asked for.
Thing is, its just not that big of a deal. It had some problems on launch day. So what? It happens sometimes. In fact, it happens oftentimes. It sucks, but its the way things are. If you wait two days, then things will usually be fixed by then. That's why I don't rush for launch day on most products like this.
Is it, now ? The stores you mentioned are something that Blizz decided that it wants the lion's share from. Nobody asked for Blizzard to create an auction house, for the simple reason everybody here has pointed out. For a game that depends so much on equipment and random factor, the RMAH is going to eliminate that. It will break the game about 5 months in.
Ah I see the tears rolling down your cheeks already.
How is it going to break the game? Answer is: It won't. This already happens in numerous other games without ill effect. You don't need to engage with the RMAH at all to enjoy the game, and the fact that other people do engage in it shouldn't bother you as it isn't a competitive game. Buying your way to victory is only an issue if the game is competitive in nature, but Diablo III is a grind game, not a competitive game, so its fine.
Don't think anyone denied these things, so don't know who you're arguing at. In fact I'm fairly certain that most people have acknowledged this and are using it as a proof of why Always-On games are actually a bad thing: because servers do go down sometimes, and that means they can't play their Always-On games. They can still play their offline games with no trouble, though. This seems to suggest that one of the two methods is flawed. When an Always-On experience can provide zero downtime (no crashes and no lag) for a game it is intended to support, then fair enough, it's possible that such a hypothetical game would be a vast improvement over an offline game. But no such game yet exists, and until one does, do not expect this issue to stop being brought up.
But here's the problem: if the game is up pretty much all the time, then its fine. I've played games which had weekly downtimes (for upgrades) and no one raged. If weekly downtimes are fine, then far less often than weekly downtimes are certainly not unreasonable, especially for the advantages they offer.
3) Because it makes your experience more fluid and reduces your risk of being hacked (which has generally been precisely the opposite of reality, as the use of servers leads to lag in single player games and your account is wide open for hacks from outside parties).
I hate it when people use the word "hacked" in this context. The correct term is "compromised". Virtually all compromised accounts in games (99%+) are NOT the result of hacking, but rather the result of social engineering or people making stupid mistakes like saving their passwords on public machines. Hacking (actually compromising the game itself, or the servers thereof) is actually incredibly rare, but social engineering occurs constantly. I was getting social engineering emails about Diablo III before it even came out.
I'm still waiting on a game which can be pointed to as an example of how Always-On games are improving my gaming experience. I'd appreciate it if you could provide some examples of games where Always-On play has truly improved the experience.
Diablo III. Most MMOs.
When developers back in 2008 were quoted as promising that the game will have offline single player, I'd say this is most certainly a point that I would contend does, indeed, merit complaints from potential buyers.
This is completely, totally, and utterly irrelevant. Things changed between 2008 and 2012. Whining about something that was said four years ago, during development, is the height of mouth-frothing nerd rage.
Hundreds of players have complained about their accounts being hacked using an exploit that allows hackers to skip merrily around the authenticators and other security of Blizzard by grabbing hold of their last online activity information, then using it to hack and bleed that character's inventory dry. This is why some users have reported that they had one particular character hacked, and it wasn't always their highest leveled one....rather, it was their.
The problem is that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that this occurred, and the fact that you believed this indicates a great level of gullibility. We've got Blizzard denying it, and mouth breathers who claim that of course they are retards who respond to social engineering emails!
Yeah, sorry, without evidence, I am going to have to say that, chances are, this didn't actually happen, and there is no evidence that it did. Just because retards claim that it did happen to them doesn't make it true, and indeed, the actually detailed instances I've read about appear to be social engineering, NOT any sort of clever session hijacking.
Remember, believing retards on the internet is always dangerous, especially when they have good reason to lie - namely, not wanting to look like idiots who don't know how to keep their account information secure. People will lie about this all the time, both to save face and to avoid the company possibly not caring about them because they didn't do their part in keeping their account secure.
Then I presume you agree that Blizzard's severe hacking problems of late are a far more troubling experience than the concerns of pirates "ruining everything"? Because I'm fairly certain that Blizzard's decision to pretend that the hacks weren't as a result of a flaw in their own security is far more likely to frustrate players out of the game than a few pirates or item dupers will.
I'm sorry, "severe hacking problems"? There are no severe hacking problems. There are a few hundred compromised accounts, and people yelling loudly about them, jiggling about as they flail and rage at Blizzard. A few hundred accounts is not a severe hacking problem, and it doesn't even show that hacking is occurring, as I stated above.
There is zero (zero!) evidence to suggest that ANY compromised account was the result of actual hacking of the blizzard servers, and a great deal of evidence to suggest that the compromised accounts were the result of social engineering - I've seen the phishing schemes for months now, no one has actually demonstrated a method of session hijacking, and Blizzard has claimed that many of the people claiming to have compromised accounts were socially engineered.
Remember, you are trusting people who have every reason to lie about their accounts being compromised not through their own stupidity but by blaming the big bad company, because otherwise, they will just look like idiots and no one will care about them. The attempts at harnessing nerd rage are obvious.
You are part of the problem with the internet believing these people without evidence of their suggestions. So quit posting without knowing what is going on.
No one I personally know has had any sort of issue with the game or their accounts being hijacked, and no one they know has either. These are people who know about social engineering and who are not vulnerable to it, and not one of them has had an issue. That's not proof that it isn't some sort of server side hack, but, as per Occam's razor, the simplest solution is usually the correct one.
Is it more likely that people would be socially engineered, and then either lie about it or not even realize that they'd been socially engineered and then whine about "hacks", or is it more likely that Blizzard, a company that has been running battlenet since 1995, which has run Diablo I, Diablo II, WoW, Warcraft II, Warcraft III, Starcraft, and Starcraft II successfully without such hijacking incidents occuring, would suddenly have major sesion hijacking problems with their latest game, despite the fact that this could have occured with any of their other games historically and hasn't?
Now, it is possible that Blizzard screwed up, but you have to admit, idiots whining is a much likelier scenario.