Post by Steve Farrelly @ 11:53am 12/06/12 | 28 Comments
"For clarity, this means you’ll need to have an Authenticator to add to your balance via Battle.net Account Management or to send the proceeds of your real-money auction house sales to your Battle.net Balance," Blizzard explained in a forum post.
"Please note that players who previously added Battle.net Balance to their account prior to this change will be able to use it to make eligible purchases on Battle.net and in the auction house without attaching an Authenticator."
Once your account balance empties this amount though, you'll need to switch to the new access system.
The aforementioned Asian server downtime was originally pinned as basic server maintenance, but Blizzard has since confirmed it was indeed to combat item dupes (as translated by Google below [sic] - thanks Blues News)
First of all, we are deeply grateful to you for your patience waiting for the development team during this maintenance time in order to restore the service as a whole.The interesting thing here, as pointed out by Gaming Blend, is item duping was one of the main reasons Blizzard adopted their always-online requirement for the game, leaving many to ponder if it was the right choice at all. It's suggested their security protocol, Warden, will continue to evolve to deal with exploits like item duping and bot farming, among many others, but offering at least a restrictive offline mode for anyone not interested in the Real-Money Auction House, or plain wanting to solo or local up their Diablo III efforts should be on Blizzard's radar. While the game obviously needs to go through patch updates for balance and feature additions, there'd arguably be a chunk of the six-million plus players out there who don't want to be locked out a play session because of lengthy server maintenance and downtime.
On June 10, our development team has found some error on the stored items in the database, these errors represent a very small part of the items can not be normal trading or selling. This error caused all less than 0.01% of the items have been copied, the majority of players and is not affected by this problem, but the database before removing these duplicated items, is unable to maintain stable. Therefore, we carried out the maintenance of the server, and perform the necessary operations to fix this problem. The development team is currently working to make the server able to resume service as soon as possible.
All original items and their reproductions will be removed from the database, follow-up, we will tell the exact time of maintenance completed, but currently estimated Server recovery services some time in the afternoon of June 11, 8 pm (Taiwan time).
We have also noted that part of the players during a short period of the game after the break and suffered back problems. This issue follow-up will be further instructions.Note: to restore service postponed to 20:00
What are your thoughts on any or all of the above?
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Posted 01:02pm 12/6/12
I have no intention of using the RMAH except for selling.
Posted 01:43pm 12/6/12
Irrelevant for single-player games though ...
Posted 03:24pm 12/6/12
Posted 03:32pm 12/6/12
Posted 03:42pm 12/6/12
It would cost HEAPS, help people create emulated servers, and finally suck money off the RMAH.
If you're keen on getting a bandwagon going then a more serious proposition might be local / reliable service delivery.
Posted 04:02pm 12/6/12
Obviously adding a feature to a completed game that wasn't built with said feature from the ground up will cost lots. The issue people were having was that there was no real reason to get rid of both true single player and open bnet if people were happy to be isolated from worldwide trading/stats, etc to make hacking pointless since it wouldn't count towards anything.
Don't really see how embedded single-player code (with less super-obvious network traffic or flow of information to spy on) could help more than sniffing actual network streams where a user-time action produces consistent and predictable data over the network to be analysed.
I think it all comes down to Blizzard wanting everyone to be exposed to the core Battle.net network and consequently the RMAH. Many of their decisions seem to revolve primarily around the RMAH.
last edited by parabol at 16:02:36 12/Jun/12
Posted 04:02pm 12/6/12
Posted 04:25pm 12/6/12
Posted 04:58pm 12/6/12
With any luck Torchlight 2 should be out next month and it will be interesting to see how it compares
Posted 05:20pm 12/6/12
d2 item and gold sales was massive - same in WoW... I think people will use it...
This exactly... tried playing again last night with a friend... literally unplayable in nightmare...
D3 seemed really short.... for the years they have spent working on it... I kinda feel a bit screwed out of $70
Posted 05:55pm 12/6/12
Posted 05:54pm 12/6/12
It doesn't matter what you think, the reality is that offline mode d3 will never, ever happen. Fact.
Stop wishing that your baby wasn't handicapped, and start working out how to live with it (or throw the baby away).
Posted 06:22pm 12/6/12
You've already said that, but no one here is making the claim that it can happen especially after release, so tone down the straw man arguments since no one is disagreeing with that point.
If you'd lay off frothing at the mouth with your Blizzard apologies maybe you'd understand what we're trying to say. i.e. Blizzard's reasoning for removing SP has nothing to do with technical issues, but centralising everything so that more money can funnel into the RMAH.
It doesn't matter what YOU think, that's likely the truth and their motivation given their recent behaviour.
I'd encourage people to discuss offline SP (e.g. in the context of why 8-hour server maintenance should affect your alone-time play), if only to get Blizzard's attention during development for their next game when they're deciding what features to put in from the start. You telling us to shut up makes you come across as a fanboy/apologist and will make Blizzard c***y if no one says anything.
last edited by parabol at 18:22:26 12/Jun/12
Posted 06:16pm 12/6/12
Technically you can already host your own server which could be considered offline, of a sorts - google around for Mooege. It's crap atm, granted, but will get there eventually.
Posted 06:27pm 12/6/12
Yeh, I immediately regretted replying to you because I knew this was coming.
Won't make the same mistake again, you're as bad as Obes these days.
It will be crap for a very long time, if its ever actually good. They've been trying to do it since beta, so its hardly 'already' imo.
Posted 06:34pm 12/6/12
No problem. I recommend in future you stick to countering the other person's actual claims rather than misrepresenting them by pretending they're saying something else - you'll have much better results and will come across less biased. Also the broken "handicapped baby" analogy is cute.
Posted 06:35pm 12/6/12
the black market places for diablo 2 ladder items was ridiculous
the RMAH is going to make heaps
Posted 06:50pm 12/6/12
You started (ironically) frothing about fanboyism with no prompting from me parabol, you just like being a c*** to people. No idea why. Can you point out anything in my posts in this thread that even implicitly endorsed the lack of offline play? What did I misrepresent?
Hate to piss in your weetbix mate, but offline play just won't happen. You may disagree about exposing server logic and assets, but the RMAH and extreme cost of bolting on offline play can't be denied.
There is a tiny, tiny glimmer of hope for local servers. Excuse me for suggesting that the discussion be directed to something that has some possibility of improving the s***** service provided to Australians.
Posted 10:00pm 12/6/12
And the fact that from reading this parabol looks like a pissed of kid who is taking all kinds of things out of context.
Also, since people like to assume blizzard fanboism, I am in no way supporting their crappy decisions and I won't be buying another product from blizzard, I will be pirating any games and if I have the time actively help others pirate them. This server thing, Mooege, sounds like they are reading packets from D3 and trying to make their own server to reply to them... this is basically writing a server for D3. If I get time I will help with this. Blizzard can suck a d***.
Posted 10:01pm 12/6/12
Posted 10:09pm 12/6/12
Posted 10:20pm 12/6/12
I've already proposed technical reasons as to why this might not necessarily be the case (client-side code vs easily-to-intercept network traffic of transactions). But hey, why get bogged down with facts and details when you can merely state an opinion without any discussion to back it up and without actually reading my posts, right?
Please Dear Sir, point out what I have taken out of context. This would require you to actually read my posts this time around, so I await your insightful response.
From my point of view, it was more a question of "why remove core features that were present in Diablo 2?". Given most of the original staff that worked on D1/2 left and given the huge focus on the RMAH, I am less surprised each day.
last edited by parabol at 22:20:17 12/Jun/12
Posted 11:48pm 12/6/12
step #1 make a bid on AH (ie. for 200k on an item)
step #2 rewind your windows clock back few hours
step #3 go to AH and see you still have the gold you just bid on an item
step #4 outbid yourself on the item
step #5 receive the money to your stash which says you just got outbidded.
step #6 rewind your clock again to receive the money back you outbidded yourself with.
Posted 10:10am 13/6/12
Posted 10:14am 13/6/12
edit: I mean, the other Diablo thread, which I thought I was posting in.
Posted 10:50am 13/6/12
Great mature discussion right there, but that's okay. We weren't expecting anything insightful nor useful from you in this thread anyway and you just reinforced that :)
Posted 11:10am 13/6/12
The RMAH is a nice little supplementary income (and will certainly encourage them to keep patching the game to fix exploits and so on), but is nothing compared to the increased revenue from eradicating piracy.
Posted 11:23am 13/6/12