So, Pirates are Playing Diablo 3

[Darkmantle]

The RMAH could've been protected without forcing single player to be online.

Really? How so then?

people keep saying this, and yet have no idea what they are talking about. There is no way to do it. Having an offline mode, means all the data, (Including items) has to be stored on the customer computer. If the data is already on your computer, it is trivial to take the data, decrypt it, and duplicate it. This is exactly what happened in D2, and this is exactly what they aim to prevent in D3.

If you have a solution to somehow solve this dilemma, please, by all means, reveal it.

Separate characters from single player and lan from multiplayer.
There.
Have the same system you have now, for multiplayer, but have an offline single player, with different characters for each, so if you want you can play with your duped items and hax, and you can do it with your friends, provided you're all on LAN, but if you join a random multiplayer server, you won't have this issue.

Will not work, because, as I've stated, if you have that offline mode, that means all the data is stored on the client computer, and if I can access the item data, I can duplicate the items, and no amount of server checks is going to stop me. See D2 for how well this plan worked.

I'll give you a hint, not very.

D2 had seperate accounts for offlineplay and closed battlenet. The closed battlenet characterdata was on the servers. There was eventually duped items, but it had little to do with your offline character.

It had a large part to do with all the item data being easily accessible to hackers though. Whether or not a char is made offline is irrelevant to the fact that if I have the data on my computer, finding a way to duplicate it is now 100 times easier.

This is simply because I have the data, it's like having the source code for items.

Cheating in offline mode is irrelevant, since it only affects the one player who's doing it.

Having offline character data available wouldn't help much, but having the necessary compiled code to run offline might. While yes, a hacker could reverse engineer the binaries in an attempt to find bugs that may allow duplication (or some other undesirable behavior), there's no guarantee it'd work online--they'd still need to find some way to exploit the bug online.

having the offline data helps more than you think. While there's no guarantee that all the bugs he finds in the code would work, he already has part of the job done for him. He has the code with which to find the bugs in, and it's very likely at least one will work. What Blizz has done here is obscure the data by putting it behind a server wall, it's an extra barrier for exploiters.

 

[General Twinkletoes]

The RMAH could've been protected without forcing single player to be online.

Really? How so then?

people keep saying this, and yet have no idea what they are talking about. There is no way to do it. Having an offline mode, means all the data, (Including items) has to be stored on the customer computer. If the data is already on your computer, it is trivial to take the data, decrypt it, and duplicate it. This is exactly what happened in D2, and this is exactly what they aim to prevent in D3.

If you have a solution to somehow solve this dilemma, please, by all means, reveal it.

Separate characters from single player and lan from multiplayer.
There.
Have the same system you have now, for multiplayer, but have an offline single player, with different characters for each, so if you want you can play with your duped items and hax, and you can do it with your friends, provided you're all on LAN, but if you join a random multiplayer server, you won't have this issue.

Will not work, because, as I've stated, if you have that offline mode, that means all the data is stored on the client computer, and if I can access the item data, I can duplicate the items, and no amount of server checks is going to stop me. See D2 for how well this plan worked.

I'll give you a hint, not very.

No, only the singleplayer characters are stored on the computer. Have the system as it is now, with a lot of server side stuff, but have only singleplayer characters on the computer. That way, people can play single player if they want, the RMAH won't be broken, random groups won't be joined by hackers, but you can still spawn and dupe items if you just want to be ridiculous in singleplayer or lan.

Of course you don't have all the data on the computer, only SP characters.

Only the singleplayer characters are stored eh? So not the monster data, world data, item and drop data, generation tables, npc data, shop data is NOT on the client machine when running an offline char? Because without those, your character would be floating forever in a big white void.

All that HAS to be stored on the client computer IF you are to be able to run it without connecting to the server. Again, giving easier access to hackers.

EDIT: misread something, but let me clarify, the way you said it should work, IT DOES WORK THAT WAY. You can play single player, but you need to be connected to the server to get all the other data! Your plan would in no way alleviate the server issues caused by D3s launch, it would basically be the same load on the servers, so I don;t see how this is a solution to the server issues.

But it should have the singleplayer data. It shouldn't have these problems at all. I know they couldn't do it now without a huge update, but it should have been there.