5281

Just got on this evening, and the auction house seems to be completely fucked. Last night I was looking for wands and seeing them for 500g or so. Now - everything a uniform 10k or more. WHAT.

5282

Someone’s trying to control the market, obviously. Probably using third-worlders to farm gold to do so, and planning to sell that same gold once the RMAH opens.

5283

Are you trying to use WoW’s unprecedented level of success as some kind of justification for every game using always-online DRM^H^H^Hservices?

5284

Of course I am. The justification is obvious. I am a big fan of DRM. I’m also a big fan of choice.

If you don’t like DRM games, don’t buy them. The problem for you is, you then have to buy non-DRM games that only make a fraction of the revenue because of the massive piracy, which means the non-DRM games are shallower, less richly designed, and often simply less fun. Not only that, but the teams that make the non-DRM games have a much harder time staying in business.

Compare Torchlight 2 to Diablo III and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. I look forward to estimates of how widely pirated Torchlight 2 actually is once it ships. In fact, look at this: Runic considers Torchlight’s rampant piracy to be loyalty-building for their upcoming MMO!

The writing is on the wall. All games get pirated to smithereens, unless they are 1) free to play (with a service backend), 2) incredibly cheap (mobile / social), or 3) always online. I’m sorry you don’t like it, but it’s the obvious reality. Actually, there is still some room for games that can function on only 20% of the revenue they should have made, but over time those will continue to become less and less common.

5285

It certainly makes sense, too, what with all those other wildly successful massively multiplayer games.

5286

Compared to the many offline games that sink without a trace, there’s quite the debate to be had there.

Though I do completely agree with the RPS post in one specific regard: the shelf life problem.

The optimal situation is that a game is shipped requiring an online service, to ensure revenue in the first critical year or two of its existence. Once the service’s cost exceeds the ongoing revenue coming in, then the game should get an official offline patch. At that point, the legit customers can keep playing, the service can get shut down (saving on running costs), and the marginal revenue loss is minimal since the game is old news.

Unfortunately we are a long way from having this happen, but there is at least some precedent – DRM has been patched out of various games in the past. Ubisoft has been particularly good about this; they patched out the DRM in From Dust, Driver: San Francisco, and others.

Diablo III will be up for the next decade, so there’s minimal issue there, but other games should certainly get pressured to go that route. I am steering clear of most EA games because I don’t trust them to get this right anytime soon, and I hope and expect that more customers will come to demand commitments to eventual offline patching to ensure longevity.

5287

I suppose I’m confused about when software-as-a-service became the preferred norm.

I’m not here to attack you or be sarcastic about this. I’m being straight-out honest with you.

I’ve never heard of a company thrilled about paying IBM to unlock mainframe cores or shelling out hundreds of thousands for Exchange support. Long-tail enforceable payments annoy people at best.

I mean, you’ve got some companies like Stardock and Valve who are all-Goddamned-about producing a never-ending torrent of free, post-release goodies for anything they make that’s moderately successful (or even not–heyo Elemental!). Maybe it’s part of some grander strategy to win customer goodwill, maybe they just really enjoy making hats, or maybe they’re actively trying to bankrupt themselves–who knows? Not us grunts, but they do it and it’s cool, so yay.

But the fact is, no one requires them to do so. Sometimes a game comes out, does well, and lands squarely in the hands of its community. Bioware didn’t do shit for KOTOR2 post-release while fans managed to patch in almost a whole 'nother game that’d been dropped out. Games like Quake and Unreal Tournament thrived on mods and player-created content for years beyond release.

But what I really take issue with here is the backwards, obscured way that Blizzard has decided to go about this themselves. Apparently sometime between the releases of Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2, they decided that they didn’t want to provide lasting value for free anymore. Maybe they were mad that South Koreans were winning $50,000 every couple of months playing Starcraft (even though they were completely off Blizzard services and not costing them anything). Or maybe they got bought out by/partnered up with Activision. Or maybe they just decided they love money–who knows? Not me.

So fine, go ahead and charge for lasting value. Release an expansion pack. Require a monthly fee if you really think it costs you that much to maintain the Battle.net servers–isn’t that effectively what MMO gamers are financing already?

But designing the entire game (or at least the technical backend thereof), from the ground up, to be online-only despite it being entirely playable as though it weren’t just smacks of dishonesty. That’s at least partly (to me) because of the level of control they need to exert over the multiplayer portion of the game to make the RMAH a financial sure bet for themselves. They’re collecting a lot of money from every sale there when it goes live, and I don’t think any of us want to argue that it exists for any other purpose than making Blizz money and saving them money (in the form of support for players getting scammed by 3rd party gold farmers). Either way, it’s about the cash.

So now we’ve got a game that can be played exactly like Diablo 2, entirely without any interaction with its online elements. . . except that now you have to deal with the potential (and currently blatant) pitfalls of always-online. . . that’s being fed, back-channel by the fringe benefit/obvious purpose for all the online jazz.

Gah, this is hard to put out clearly. MMOs, I understand the idea behind, and don’t buy because I can’t afford the fee and don’t think their gameplay is worth it. Expansions, I buy or don’t buy based on my enjoyment of the original. DLC, I generally just don’t buy, but might if it presents a value. In all this situations, the company’s method of drawing long-term profits is upfront and doesn’t alter the core technical performance.

With the RMAH driving/being entirely unrelated to/having something to do with always-online, the software as a service shit becomes non-optional despite the game itself–the thing you’re really playing–not needing it.

Don’t get me wrong–it can (and does) benefit some people, and it can do interesting things. But Diablo 3 is so very close to enabling a pure, offline Diablo 2 experience for others. . . minus the server issues. And so Blizz ensures their profit for maintaining things in the long run, but also does so in a way that, to me, makes for a lesser game.

Not an awful game, not a shit game, but a lesser one. I wish–really and truly wish–that they’d settled on going full-blown MMO, or cranking out expansions and micropayments, and not left the game sitting halfway between what I’d like it to be (offline singleplayer) and what it is (not that).

Fuck, I don’t even know if any of that made any Goddamn sense. I’m sorry for those of you who read to this point if it didn’t. At this point, I’m just sad and tired and trying to convey why. It’s the same as the SC2 community feels now: the game is so close to achieving the levels of its predecessor, but is hobbled without an obvious benefit for the way that we want to enjoy it.

Maybe that’s what it is. Some folks just don’t get to enjoy these games as they want to, but they could have been given the option if Blizzard viewed their profit insurance options a little bit differently. It’s probably as close as I’ll get to my feelings on the matter in a forum post, so I’ll cap it there.

5288

I hear you, and I understand your upset. And yes, maybe Blizzard could have been more Valve-like.

But really, I am honestly not sure how much money Valve makes off its games anymore. No one has any idea at all about Valve’s finances. If Steam weren’t making such ridiculous amounts of money, would Valve be in the same boat? Blizzard doesn’t have Steam providing a cash hypercow.

I guess I just come down on the other side: I love that Blizzard is getting paid by everyone who plays their games, and I’m willing to sacrifice offline for a much deeper and richer single-player game than I think I would otherwise have gotten, if Blizzard hadn’t been able to commit to a piracy-free revenue plan for the game.

But we’re comparing hypotheticals here, which is never objective.

5289

Yeah, I really want to know what people are searching for when they say they’re buying entire sets of rare equipment for 1000 gold a piece. Even the crappiest level 10 rare item I’ve seen has a buyout of at least 10K, unless there’s no buyout option, and I bid on a really nifty looking item for 500 gold yesterday which today has a bid of almost 20K. A level 10 legendary item would require you to be an auction house speculator to buy it in the first place.

5290

Apparently sometime between the releases of Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2, they decided that they didn’t want to provide lasting value for free anymore.
Really? That’s interesting. When I installed Starcraft II on my new PC the other day, I had to download twenty-three patches. It seems like Starcraft II has been supported better than nearly every single other game in the same time period, without asking for a single dime from any of their customers.

I also doubt Blizzard will make money off the auction house. The iTunes App Store barely makes Apple a profit, if at all. These services are extremely complex and expensive to run, and they’ll probably barely break-even off of it.

I get that it negatively affects the experience of many customers, but the fact is that the online requirement has been known about for literally years. Blizzard was not hiding it. Customers wary about the online requirement should not have bought the game.

For me, I was going to play on Battle.net anyway, just like I did Diablo II. Therefore, my experience is 100% identical to what I would have gotten regardless of if the game lacked offline play.

5291

It’s really not that hard to find good prices. Refine your search to pretty much exactly what you need, and then sort the results. Don’t bid – buy out. Only spend what you want to spend. Don’t let anyone fleece you.

Through normal difficulty, I was wielding the same weapons from level 20 to level 33: A pair of rare slotted weapons that I kept upgrading through better and better gems. None of the drops I found could beat them. It wasn’t until Nightmare difficulty that I could even reasonably replace them. I bought them off of the AH for 1k a piece.

I was probably lucky, as I was buying on day 1. Still, there are people out there listing things at their default pricing just to see what they can see. There are still people listing things for only a few grand on level 20+ stuff.

After years and years of playing the WoW AH, this is pretty straightforward stuff.

5292

There are plenty of games that have had financial success without resorting to always-online DRM. Have they been the billion dollar phenomenons that World of Warcraft was? Of course not; WoW is an aberration. It doesn’t say “Aha! Online DRM works!” any more than any of the dozens of failed MMOs (and recent Ubisoft titles) say the opposite. Blizzard doesn’t have all the money because of online DRM; they have all the money because of World of Warcraft and the enormous loyal community they’ve built with the Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft franchises. Blizzard could shit in a box and they’d have a million pre-orders within a week. They’re not representative of anything in the real world.

Shelf life is one obvious problem, but how about modding? How does that fit into the new world of “games as services”? Where would PC gaming be today without modding? Hell where would companies like id and Valve be? Do you think they would have achieved anywhere near the level of success they did without modding and communities that were nurtured by SDKs and 3rd party servers?

This will never happen. Why? Because there is nothing in it for the companies. When they can shut down an old game, they make it that much easier to push the new version. And what are customers going to do? What do you even expect them to do? Obviously you don’t expect them to boycott anything, so…what? Should they be writing strongly worded letters en masse? They’d arrive at a mailbox attached directly to a dumpster and you know it.

Anyway, Armando pretty much already covered what I was going to say, so there’s no point in me continuing to babble on here.

5293

Like I said, I personally am effectively boycotting most EA games over this exact shelf life issue, so yes, I do think boycott is a viable option here. I am certainly far more likely to buy an Ubisoft online-DRM game because of their track record of patching it out. (You ignored that data point completely, there, didn’t you?)

You can say that Blizzard’s money hats aren’t because of always-online, but I simply disagree. WoW made the money it did because it was 1) better than all competition and 2) unpirateable, especially in Asia. SC2 and DIII are direct results of that trend; it’s a positive feedback loop, because people trust them to spend the money well, so they deal with the always-online issues, which ensures that Blizzard has the money to spend well.

Modding is a casualty of the whole situation, which is a shame, I agree. But that’s where indies come in; the indie scene is what used to be the modding scene.

We’ll have to agree to disagree at this point.

5294

So Blizzard’s wild success didn’t start until WoW? Blizzard’s games weren’t good until WoW? Other games aren’t good if they don’t have heavy DRM? Every pirated copy is a lost sale? Even though WoW and Starcraft 2 are pirated (And Diablo 3 beta was partially working last I heard) the DRM is still acceptable? Jesus. JESUS.

5295

Yes, it was such a devastating piece of evidence against my argument that I at least had to attempt to conceal it. But you found me out!

Anyway, I’m glad Ubisoft patched out the DRM of a couple games or whatever. That’s definitely an awesome thing. I’d look into perhaps purchasing them, but I just can’t bring myself to support Ubisoft and their notion of this kind of DRM ever being acceptable. Once they drop the DRM completely, I’ll perhaps look into buying their games again.

But boycotting EA because of the shelf life issue is kind of strange, though. I mean I get it, and I agree with it even, but when exactly do you stop boycotting? When EA patches the DRM out of one game? Two? Is that supposed to assure people that they’ll patch all future games as well? When do you start boycotting again? When one game reaches two years old and the DRM is still there?

And also, what DRM are you even referring to with EA? I was under the impression that Origin, as a DRM, was much the same as Steamworks. I’m pretty sure Valve hasn’t patched the DRM out of Half-Life 2, so why aren’t you boycotting them?

5296

Set level range, set item type, set quality, set max buyout to say 2k, sort by buyout. For level 14-15 items, for example, that turns up 2-10 pages of rares for most slots. For example, there are 17 PAGES of level 14-15 rare (yellow) chest armor under 2k buyout at this very moment.

5297

I understand from RPS that the game ships with guest passes more or less equivalent to the stress-test beta - anybody have a spare one floating around?

5298

added some comments in bold.

Yeah, on an open system like the PC, online is always going to be the biggest set of games. What are all the biggest franchises and names in PC gaming? Most of them are online only (League of Legends, WoW, Runescape, Maple Story, and now DotA 2 and Diablo 3). This is of course not including Facebook based franchises like Farmville, Cityville, X-ville, Mafia Wars, etc.

But, I don’t necessarily think it was the right decision for D3. I think they’re going to get a lot of legitimate backlash against this, because unlike these other games, D3 has a core single player experience that a lot of people play it for, and Blizzard didn’t design it purely around multiplayer, which they could have (a la Mythos or something).

Even non wildly successful MMOs can make money, though. Most triple-A non-online franchises for PC these days are ports of console games and often heavily discounted on Steam.

Again, look at almost all the biggest PC franchises these days.

5299

How close do you need to be in level to make grouping worthwhile?

5300

Hm, I suppose I’m confusing the DRM servers with the online-play servers. EA is notorious for shutting down the latter, but the former, not so much.

Valve has not yet orphaned any of its customers, AFAIK, which is why they’re not on the RepoMan Watch List.

Squee, we’re talking about 2012 here. You’re still talking the mid-nineties. Try to keep up. Things have changed a lot in the last fifteen years. Blizzard knows this; it’s why they’re 1) still around, 2) still selling shitloads of everything, and 3) entirely online-only.