WTF Blizzard

[dsheinem]

Diablo III requires players to constantly be online, will let them sell loot for real money

Diablo III prohibits mods.

Add these to the lack of LAN support and DRM shenanigans in Starcraft 2, the RealID fiasco, etc. - ever since Activision bought Blizzard, they have really started to go downhill.

[flamepanther]

I've always thought fan perception of the company was exaggerated in the first place. That does suck though.

[Hobie-wan]

What the flying fuck?

That's fine for people who want to play on Battle.net. I just want to play with people I know who I'm sure aren't cheating. Buying items for real money is like cheating to me. I don't want to play with people who spend money to push the win button. Seems like this will only encourage people to mindlessly grind at the game too, which won't be good for their health. How long before some shmuck dies from playing D3 for too many hour straight?

When I was playing WoW I was in a very small guild. We were light RPers who were playing to enjoy the game. Nobody was in a rush to endgame. Nobody was in to dueling. Nobody really grinded for gear either. We had someone join the guild that seemed ok at first. He gave a bunch of people some nice equipment at one point. We later found out he had bought gold, then gone to the auction house. We were all pissed. I ended up spending gold I was saving for a mount to buy another copy of the sword from the auction house (it was a bind on equip item) and sent it to him as I didn't want his 'tainted' sword on principle. He left the guild soon after.

Anyway, this puts another damper on my enthusiasm for D III.

[Hazerd]

nice way to make a few dollars every week depending on how much you play, although i can see certain items reaching over $1000, itll happen!

[the7k]

nice way to make a few dollars every week depending on how much you play, although i can see certain items reaching over $1000, itll happen!

$1000 I kinda doubt (possible, but highly unlikely), but I do remember seeing items fetch prices as high as $150 in other games I played.

[Hobie-wan]

nice way to make the game into work for some people and make it harder to find people who actually want to play the game for fun sake

Fixed that for you.

[isiolia]

Seems like an overall strategy to try and take care of potential issues before they happen.

Not that I'm happy to see some of it either, but I can appreciate why they're doing it.

RMT is going to happen anyway. They can legitimize it, therefore cutting the legs out of under unofficial channels and keeping tabs/control on things (and profiting), or they can spend time fighting it like they have with WoW.
I'm not really sure what to think of it as of yet, but I think it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. My general opinion of RMT is that it's only especially bad when the RMT players can get in your way - which isn't as likely in Diablo games than it is in many MMOs. Not like you'll have to compete for pops against people killing the same boss for the 100th time so they can sell the loot. If you want to ignore it, you can. If you feel like spending $20 instead of 20 hours, the option is there.
With the sheer number of free to play/pay to win online games out there, it's really not that big a jump.

Now, removing options for people who just want to play an offline or LAN game I'm not pleased to see, but given the amount of problems they've had with hacking/piracy I'm also not surprised.

[SwooshBear]

Well, my interest in this game dropped. Might as well look into Diablo II instead.

[jfe2]

Ew.

[MrPopo]

As someone with an always-on internet connection I don't have any issues with this. Also, the lack of mod support sucks until you realize that D1 and D2 don't support mods either. People have just reverse engineered the game files and directly modified them (some are plain text, others are DLL changes). So that option will be just as available as it is now; namely you can't get on battle.net with them. And the internet connection part will be modded out as part of it; mark my words.