So, Pirates are Playing Diablo 3

[Zeh Don]

The scene has never created an emulator for a game that works like Diablo 3, WoW, Rift or any other game that has it's content generated and run server-side. Ever.

If you're going to insist on talking, please make sure you know what you're talking about. WoW's Private Server community flourishes; everything from Vanilla Only Servers, Blizz-Like Servers to customer rules, such as entire Servers dedicated to nothing but open warfare PvP.

Diablo 3's beta was used a basis for testing server emulation - and it was emulated successfully. The problem is, Diablo 3's servers treat a player's game more like a game of Counter-Strike than World of Warcraft, which creates a few issues for server emulation, at least from a single PC.

Trust me: Diablo 3 will be emulated quite soon. And, once it is, the main reason for the DRM that is literally ruining the experience for over half of the entire Diablo III Playerbase will be negated.

 

[nu1mlock]

The scene has never created an emulator for a game that works like Diablo 3, WoW, Rift or any other game that has it's content generated and run server-side. Ever.

If you're going to insist on talking, please make sure you know what you're talking about. WoW's Private Server community flourishes; everything from Vanilla Only Servers, Blizz-Like Servers to customer rules, such as entire Servers dedicated to nothing but open warfare PvP.

Diablo 3's beta was used a basis for testing server emulation - and it was emulated successfully. The problem is, Diablo 3's servers treat a player's game more like a game of Counter-Strike than World of Warcraft, which creates a few issues for server emulation, at least from a single PC.

Trust me: Diablo 3 will be emulated quite soon. And, once it is, the main reason for the DRM that is literally ruining the experience for over half of the entire Diablo III Playerbase will be negated.

I never said WoW's private servers are bad, I just said they were about six years ago. I even said they might be up to speed nowadays.

I've also said that Diablo 3 will probably be emulated down the road, but not by any scene group. I have no doubts that another group of people will get together to create a working emulator.

The beta emulator was successful in terms of being able to emulate Blizzards servers, but not close to the "real" beta. It is of course a start, but it has a really long way to go to be able to emulate Diablo 3's official servers.

Again, no scene group will ever create an emulator for Diablo 3. They can't even use the current beta server as they have to develop it all from scratch. Using the current one is against the rules.

 

[Bostur]

I don't doubt the 'scene's' enthusiasm in terms of technical challenges. But I doubt they have the patience to gather necessary gameplay statistics and playtest the result. Those that do might as well make their own game instead.

So you know nothing. What a surprise.

Feel free to surprise me, I'm looking forward to seeing the results.

 

[lapan]

I don't doubt the 'scene's' enthusiasm in terms of technical challenges. But I doubt they have the patience to gather necessary gameplay statistics and playtest the result. Those that do might as well make their own game instead.

So you know nothing. What a surprise.

Actually, you're the one that seem to know nothing, as all you can come up with is something like that, without even explaining why we're so wrong about something so obvious.

The scene has never created an emulator for a game that works like Diablo 3, WoW, Rift or any other game that has it's content generated and run server-side. Ever.

They sure have. They usually lag behind the live version and tend to have lots of problems early on, but there are several working privately run servers for WoW, Raganarök online and similar games. Especially Ragnaröks servers are really well made at this point, though that comes from the age of the game itself, people had lots of time to perfect it. Then again, it depends on your definition of "the scene". It will probably atract a different kind of cracker than the usual single player cracks.

 

[Zer_]

This has nothing to do with hacks and cheats and everything to do with money.

Sorry, but you're wrong. The reason it's always online is -not- piracy, it's to add a layer of anti-hacking security, which is in turn necessary to make Blizzard money on the RMAH.

This is not a defense of that, by the way, I just want to see anger for the right reasons.

Not in the least. It's easy as hell to protect your game from cheats. D2 was hacked in Open B.net due to locally stored item tables. Now, D3 uses servers to generate items for both Single Player and MP. All they need to do is add algorithmic hash tag security to online D3 characters and items while leaving offline item tables as-is.

Currently, if the item tables are leaked/hacked, then Blizzard has to make some pretty significant changes to them to protect the game from hacks. This is exactly what happened with Diablo 2 V1.10. They redid all the item tables for the game, added synergies. Nothing wrong with it really, it's just a lot of work for nothing.

With algorithmically generated hash tags, you get a very solid security system. If ever it does get hacked, all Blizzard has to do is modify the algorithm to a re-secure everything and be done with it.

Blizzard made a choice to make this game available to those with online connectivity only, and that was a mistake on their part. If the DRM is indeed cracked, then the current item tables have already been released, or at least the beta versions have. So much for that.

 

[Scow2]

People keep saying "Diablo 3 has DRM!" as though it's something like Ubisoft's monstrosities. No, it doesn't. DRM is trying to keep players from having access to game files they already have. What Blizzard has done with Diablo 3 is not give the players access[/b] to the game files required to make it work.

What they need is a leaked server. They don't have one yet. Otherwise, they may have all the ingredients for the game, but not know what to do with anything. They have the files for the NPCs, but not the locations. They have the files for all the monsters and items, but not the spawn locations or drop systems.

Diablo III is an instance-driven MMO, not a single-player offline game of old.

What they may have done is get the Client, but without the server, they have nothing. And the only reason Pirates would be able to play on servers that aren't crashing is by not having sufficient people playing on them. Not only would a pirate have to find a copy of the client, but they'd also have to find a working server somewhere too.

 

[if_then_else]

People keep saying "Diablo 3 has DRM!" as though it's something like Ubisoft's monstrosities. No, it doesn't. DRM is trying to keep players from having access to game files they already have. What Blizzard has done with Diablo 3 is not give the players access[/b] to the game files required to make it work.

What they need is a leaked server. They don't have one yet. Otherwise, they may have all the ingredients for the game, but not know what to do with anything. They have the files for the NPCs, but not the locations. They have the files for all the monsters and items, but not the spawn locations or drop systems.

Diablo III is an instance-driven MMO, not a single-player offline game of old.

This.

The first person in this thread that got it right.

And for the ones saying that there's no "pirate version" of WoW, google "MaNGOS".

 

[Pharsalus]

Actually bought a copy, but i gotta go to drill this weekend , with no internet access. So what does that mean? Blizzard is screwing the troops is what that means!

 

[Tanakh]

Not only would a pirate have to find a copy of the client, but they'd also have to find a working server somewhere too.

They do not, usually private servers run the content with custom made scripts, not the original ones.

Also... u need to edit that post, italcs and bold seem messy.

 

[Toilet]

So how is that always online DRM working for you Blizzard?

 

[VincentX3]

So how is that always online DRM working for you Blizzard?

And if you even bothered to read the comments OR description you would see that's the "game only" with no crack included.

So yea =P

 

[Nargleblarg]

Why are we in a situation where people who stole Diablo 3 are able to launch the game and just... play, while people who purchased the game have to wait for servers to be fixed to play single player?

Steal the cracked game, play it.

Buy the game, don't get to play it.

That DRM sure did work >_>

No they are not. Diablo 3 has not been cracked yet and will not be cracked any time soon and by soon I mean in the next several months.

Just posting that "Guys seriously there is a pirated version out please believe me" holds no weight on the internet.

Spoiler

Seems Relevant...

 

[Atmos Duality]

Again, no scene group will ever create an emulator for Diablo 3. They can't even use the current beta server as they have to develop it all from scratch. Using the current one is against the rules.

The result won't be PERFECT, nor up to Blizzard's standards (their processing corpus is staggering, even among businesses) but I wouldn't be so foolish as to claim that an emulator is impossible or that one won't be developed.

It happened with WoW, it even happened with the Athena Server (Ragnarok Online) when 90% of the country was still back on dial up, it will happen here.
Count on it.

 

[nu1mlock]

The result won't be PERFECT, nor up to Blizzard's standards (their processing corpus is staggering, even among businesses) but I wouldn't be so foolish as to claim that an emulator is impossible or that one won't be developed.

It happened with WoW, it even happened with the Athena Server (Ragnarok Online) when 90% of the country was still back on dial up, it will happen here.
Count on it.

People are obviously talking about two different kind of scenes here. While I was talking about the scene with the usual groups which crack games (Reloaded, Skidrow etc.) (1), others started talking about the "private server groups" (2). Two very different things.

I've already said that (1) will never create a server emulator due to the time it would take to get one that would be allowed within that scene and wouldn't be against their rules. I've also said that others (2) WILL create a working emulator, only I'm sure it will take quite a while to get it on par with Blizzards servers. After all, it took quite a while to get the private WoW servers to where they are.

I've never said there aren't any private WoW servers, I've just said that the scene (1) has never created an emulator for a game like Diablo 3, WoW, Rift or any other game that works like those.

I hope that clear some things up a bit and stop the confusion.

 

[jehk]

The result won't be PERFECT, nor up to Blizzard's standards (their processing corpus is staggering, even among businesses) but I wouldn't be so foolish as to claim that an emulator is impossible or that one won't be developed.

D3 is being emulated right now but its total shit on wheels.

I may be wrong. It's been awhile since I bothered to read up on the subject but I believe all private WoW servers are based on a leaked version from Blizzard. If the same happens for D3 then its very possible.

 

[Robert Ewing]

Well, it took a few minutes longer than usual I guess. Good job on blocking out pirates Blizzard!

 

[geK0]

Are Pirates actually playing D3? Do you have any sources for this?

The online DRM in D3 is a different case than in most games. D3 is dependant on a server infrastructure that does more than check the copy of the game. To 'crack' D3 would require developing a standalone server for it. Unless it is leaked by Blizzard such a server wouldn't be identical to the official one.

To be honest, you wouldn't need a server to emulate what is occurring between the D3 client and the Bliz servers. All you would need is to figure out a way to locally replicate what is occurring and route all D3 client requests to the local "server emulator." Easy squeezy. I'm sure someone's already figured it out. This isn't the most fool proof DRM method in the world.

The drawback? You won't get to play with other people unless you're able to replicate B.Net but lets face it, Pirates and crackers aren't going to go that far.

There's plenty of unofficial WOW, Runescape and Guildwar servers out there (If you ever want to play vanilla-WOW there's probably a server out there that runs it); I'm sure somebody out there would be willing to do the same with D3, especially with all this DRM BS they apparently have. Give it a couple of months.


Personally, I don't blame Blizzard for all of this, they're just the developers of the game itself; this seems like something that was decided by the higher-ups in Activision.

 

[geK0]

So how is that always online DRM working for you Blizzard?

LOL, I looked that up as soon as I saw this thread. I'd still rather buy it, because I prefer to play on official servers when playing multi-player; I was just curious to see whether it was there already. I have to admit, the DRM is very close to being a deal breaker for me, but I'll give it a couple more months to see if they have sorted out the kinks and glitches.

Seems like Activision should start watching the Jimquisition and Extra Creditz a little more often, lmao!

 

[Atmos Duality]

I've never said there aren't any private WoW servers, I've just said that the scene (1) has never created an emulator for a game like Diablo 3, WoW, Rift or any other game that works like those.

I hope that clear some things up a bit and stop the confusion.

Ah. Yeah, the wording threw me off a bit. I see what you're saying now.

I'm quite familiar with how that works; I used MMOs as my case study for my network security degree, and I used Diablo 2 hacks as a point of comparison (the importance of digests and hashes; a primitive topic compared to what we have today).

In fact, I question why the first scene was even brought up to begin with. It doesn't really apply to the topic at hand.

***

Upon further inspection, I see a some ignorant claims elsewhere in the topic; like how this is identical to Assassin's Creed 2 (it's not; AC2 was a case of adding DRM netcode to a complete, finished product. Diablo 3 is a server-client relationship to its very core. It is, in fact, almost identical to a heavily-instanced MMO by technical design.)

Sigh, I have too much shit to do today to tackle that kind of ignorance, and it's not like it will do the world any good.

Carry on.

EDIT: This one is short enough...

Well, it took a few minutes longer than usual I guess. Good job on blocking out pirates Blizzard!

For once, the existence of a pirated version isn't as important as providing it at the same quality of service as Blizzard can. That's what separates pirating a "service" compared to pirating a "product".

Games as services are less vulnerable (BUT NOT IMMUNE) to piracy.
It's why WoW continues to print money despite there being dozens of pirate/private WoW servers out there.

 

[geK0]

Just posting that "Guys seriously there is a pirated version out please believe me" holds no weight on the internet.

Seems like it holds enough weight, because it would have been nothing short of a miracle if there were not pirates!

You doubt that people have pirated D3? : \


so many posts so close together; but it doesn't alert people when I just edit a quote into a previous post, does it? *sigh*