this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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While I don't condone DDoS attacks, the only reason for D4 to be online-only is monetization IMO: Blizzard wants to sell cosmetics, so people have to see other people wearing them. There is little gameplay benefit from being an MMO-lite.
Probably all sorts of datamining regarding the way people play also. Can't do that so easily if people are playing offline.
Brilliant insight. They probably are tracking metrics on what will encourage people to buy stuff the most too
Activision owns patents on the following:
A system that tracks what store items you might be interested in, and places you in matches with high-skilled players who own that item, making you associate the item with high skill
A system that places you against lower-skilled opponents immediately after you bought an item, making you associate making a purchase with being better.
From here to "they want you to look at other players and how expensive their shit is" is only one step. Honestly at this point I'm even surprised they're not faking it entirely, making other players just happen to be wearing expensive skins on your screen even if the actual account hasn't bought that. It's not like you can check anyway.
Bloody hell this is some nefarious brain hacking type stuff.
Indeed. It also has the inherent side effect of making the game pay to win, because if you don't pay you get put in hard matches against the skilled people who paid, and if you do it puts you against weaker opponents. This is why micro transactions should be banned straight up, even if they do not impact gameplay. Belgium had the right idea.
I experienced this first hand playing wow. The team will straight up send out email surveys asking if players would be willing to pay x for y service with different people getting different prices. They calculate these things to extract as much money from the dedicated fans as possible. I went back to playing the private servers.
Probably looking at the wardrobe to see what people like looks-wise with what's in-game already. Then ensure they push more of that into the store.
Never open the store.
I came to the same conclusion as you: why would people buy their stuff if they could just run an unlocker script or edit a config file to give that stuff to them? It's basically malicious DRM
All DRM is malicious, and DRM is why not to buy. Plenty of other games that you can buy and also own.
Potentially unpopular opinion, I like running into random other players in the world, particularly when doing events. I don't give a fuck about Blizzard's cosmetics and, frankly, unless I'm examining people, I can't even tell what they're wearing half the time.
And you should have the option to do so.
But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't have the option to play offline if they so choose.
There would be benefit to it if they embraced it. I'm convinced they wanted for it to be more of an MMO-lite but got cold feet and played it safe, as with everything else.
This one is hard for me to have an opinion on.
Loot rolls need to be controlled by the server, or else people will just exploit all that stuff.
Diablo doesn't have a lot of mechanics that really need players to interact with each other, but games like that and WOW are entirely based around gear grind. All accomplishment requires players to have a level playing field or players just won't want to play. It's just wierd like that.
If people want an offline game, they should buy an offline game. It's not that smart to buy an always-online game and then complain about it.
I don't know anything about the most recent games, but if it's anything like D1 and D2, a huge part of the game is single player. So what if someone wants to cheat their way through the game? It's not affecting other players and you get to enjoy the game the way you want to.
IMHO the best way is what Blizzard did with Diablo 2, where players simply had every choice: Want to play alone? You can, just play offline. Want to play with people in your house? You can, using LAN mode. Want to play with people online with your own single player character? You can, using open Battle.Net. Want to play with people online with a server-stored character to prevent cheats? You can, using closed Battle.Net.
There is IMHO no technical reason blizzard couldn't offer exactly this with Diablo 4 Also, I haven't bought Diablo 4, one of the reasons is it being online-only. Would it be playable offline, I might have had bought it.