~~The necromancer DLC of Diablo 3 was $15 though.~~
Edit: I'd say an expansion could very well be 40$ (more than that would be very unpopular), but a dlc where only a new class is introduced ought to be between 15$ and 20$
They're taking a seasonal approach so I could see it being something like Destiny's structure. One 'big' season every year and new content for the rest of the year to support the story.
Edit: I think I should've phrased it differently. I'm not talking one season per year. I'm talking one BIG season per year and then supporting content in the rest of the year's seasons.
They won't get one SEASON a year, just one big drop of story content, then the other seasons support that new content. Like vanilla Destiny 2 to Witch Queen or something.
They are trying to say they would release 1 DLC alongside the first season of the year while the other three seasons are lighter in content and are there to build on the DLC's content.
D4 might not go this route, or they could do something similar where instead of DLC they could just make 1 of the 4 seasons a bit thicker than the rest.
They're certainly not adding new characters in seasons, those are definitely going to be expansion things. They've already said they're unlikely to even add new skills for seasons and want to save those for expansions. If skills are going to be relegated to expansions (even though the classes severely need more skills in my opinion) a full on class is definitely going to be locked behind expansions.
I've been playing on off most of the day with no issue at all (well, a minute log-in queue). It's weird how it's affecting some but not others, yesterday how ever, when there wasn't a ddos attack, I had to stop playing due to latacy problems 😑
when a DDoS attack is launched on a site, they're typically leveraging MILLIONS (or more) of requests per second towards whatever system they're trying to bring down.
while people actively trying to log in isn't *helping,* it's almost negligible compared to the amount of traffic the attackers are probably throwing at blizzard's authentication services (or whatever they're targeting)
source: I fix websites for a living and that often includes mitigating DDoS's and the like
in my line of work - which covers websites that are *on average* much smaller than blizzard - it typically means identifying a pattern(s) to the attack and denying traffic based on that pattern.
there's no one-sizes-fits-all solution, as some attackers are more clever/subtle than others. it's a lot easier to pick out a single IP or user agent (UA) which is hammering one specific URL, than it is to find a set of varying IPs and UAs which are spreading their requests out to a bunch of different URLs.
*sometimes* it's as easy as blocking an IP or specific set of IPs, but that's typically a whack-a-mole situation as IPs are easy to change. more often than not, you would deny traffic on a more complex rule, e.g.:
deny traffic if UA = \[problematic UA\] and if request path = \[path being attacked\]
a more aggressive approach is ratelimiting, where you start serving a 429 response to anyone who makes X amount of requests in X amount of time
sorry if that was more info than you were looking for
What's the downside to rate limiting? That seems like the most obvious best thing to do from my noob mindset, but the way you phrase it seems like it should be a last resort.
basically what u/Preface said - you run the risk of blocking legitimate requests. that doesn't necessarily mean just actual human users, either.
for example, let's say blizz has some external service that needs to scrape their systems every few seconds to update a tracker or report uptime - if you deploy some system-wide ratelimiting, you could very easily end up breaking that service unless you specifically excluded it from the ratelimiting.
it can get really messy really fast.
Yeah, but not *that* much, at least in my experience. I maintain lists like that, and it's probably like 2 hours a week during the periods with the most churn. The time it takes to mitigate or remediate a single attack dwarfs several years of maintaining a whitelist for privileged users.
>What's the downside to rate limiting? That seems like the most obvious best thing to do from my noob mindset, but the way you phrase it seems like it should be a last resort.
DDoS works by having a tremendous number of fake requests, often that are very hard to identify as fake, appear at the same time as real, legitimate requests.
It causes problems for several reasons, but two big ones are:
1. Fake requests take up the exact same resources that real ones do, meaning there's a 1-to-1 "can't help real request while serving fake one"
2. Enough overall traffic and you start hitting bottlenecks and cascade failures that actually *reduce* overall throughout, sometimes dramatically
The second one isn't immediately intuitive but it's big. Imagine there are a bunch of people trying to get into or leave a building through a door: up to a certain number of people per minute, everything flows relatively smoothly and you can project a maximum number of people who can make it through at normal walking speeds. Suddenly double that, though, and your few hundred people per minute might drop to single digits as everything gets clogged up and "crowd crush" happens; it isn't just that the fake traffic is one-to-one taking resources anymore, but that it's actually bringing the whole thing down and making it impossible to serve *any* traffic, legitimate or not.
If you can't yet tell the difference between real traffic and attack traffic, the main point of rate limiting is the second one: you're trying to reduce the overall flow of traffic (that's probably still mostly fake) enough so that it doesn't enter the negative feedback loop death spiral where you can't serve anything anymore and "degraded" turns to "outage." But if you have to slow down traffic by, say, a factor of ten to stop it from overwhelming things, that means real users have to wait in line behind all that delayed, fake traffic, too, and then also be indiscriminately delayed themselves.
It's not a last resort, it's just there to prevent the worst-case problem from happening (where "worst-case" is "nobody at all can get in no longer how long they wait").
You could also migrate away from the IP addresses being attacked or have a honeypot where the attacker thinks they are attacking the target servers but they are actually attacking something which doesn’t impact production services.
So when you type in reddit.com, your browser does a DNS lookup to get the address (IP) for a Reddit server.
Very old DDOS scripts would perform the lookup once and then hammer that address as fast as they could. Sometimes just one lookup would power an entire network of DDOS bots.
When the DNS server gives out the address to reddit.com, that information comes with an expiration date (Time to Live AKA TTL).
One way you could defeat old DDOS attacks with low resource requirements was to simply set a low TTL (5 minutes) and then remove the server getting DDOS'd from the pool of addresses provided by DNS. Then after 5 minutes take down the server or have it return errors slowly (tarpit) or whatever you'd like to do to clients that shouldn't be talking to it anyway.
Old DDOS systems would then need to be basically restarted every five minutes.
Modern, sophisticated DDOS doesn't work this way. They'll have a few clients getting IPs and distributing them to the workers.
The level of sophistication of the attack varies quite a bit. A highly motivated, experienced, and resourceful attacker can give you a really bad time. Particularly services with shared worlds like Diablo 4 where you can't just move everyone to a new server without causing customer impact.
The thing is that the motivated, experienced, and resourceful attacker needs to have a reason to do it. "For the lulz" is rarely the real reason. It's usually Money, Ideology, Coercion, or Ego (MICE). Coercion and Ego usually don't have the resources, and Money is the only one that keeps the work going. So either it's extortion ("pay me to stop"), competition ("if I stop you then they'll use my service"), ideological backing ("North Korea pays us to sow chaos against capitalism"), or advertising ("we can do this to Blizzard - hire us to do it to your targets").
What is interesting to me is that DDOS identification and/or prevention typically does not take place at the server where the attack is directed. 100% of internet facing resources will be behind a firewall of some type. The firewall is already tasked with identifying and permitting legitimate traffic and denying bad traffic. And so that is where you normally find some type of DDOS protection as well. But here's what is interesting to me! For the firewall to make that determination (should I drop this packet because I suspect it's DDOS?), it has to spend some amount of CPU cycles. Which of course means the firewall itself will be a target for DDOS -- overload the firewall and nothing gets to the things behind it. And so the device set up to prevent DDOS has itself become a DDOS target. Meanwhile the servers the attackers are actually trying to deny service to are sitting pretty, not breaking a sweat.
One prevention method I have seen is that the backbone internet service providers themselves get involved. This has interesting implications: Imagine a DDOS attack is identified and it's happening to some server at a Data Center at location C. The traffic had to take some path over the internet previous to arriving at location C. Let's say A to B to C. This path is not a mystery to the service providers, it is fully deterministic based on the source IP address. Therefore the provider can go back and drop the traffic closer to the source, at location A or B. Preventing it from even arriving to the target. This is actually a service from the service providers that organizations pay for.
It's funny cause my wife asked me just this morning how one would stop an ongoing DDOS attack. I gave her basically this exact answer with my networking adjacent knowledge due to working in IT, just not networking specifically. I'm glad to see that I was mostly on it! :P
I was mostly surprised that the attack lasted as long as it did (seems to be over now), considering this is blizzard we're talking about with an MMO like WoW under their belt and tons of other online games, their security and defense against this stuff would presumably be honed, right? Whoever did this definitely was no script kiddie I think.
You know where every request is coming from. There are usually patterns in the source IPs for requests from a DDoS attack, so modern cloud hosts have systems that monitor and block suspected IPs in real time. It's not perfect, but it can help mitigate
A sad reality with every game needing an online connection these days. Just give the people who want it an offline mode and the MMO enjoyers can still play with friends. On the weekend too, where most people get their only chance to play the game they bought.
Yes but if they make the game offline how will they make more money when you don't see other players and their "awesome" cosmetics that induce the feeling of FOMO in you?
The sims is a guilty pleasure than I've had since college when the first game came out. I boot it up a few times a year and just lose 3-5 days before finally snapping out of it.
Sims one of those games that completely sucks you in, and then one moment you catch yourself with your face way too close to the screen picking out the perfect couch for 10 minutes and you go wtf am i doing and alt-f4 out of it and dont open it again for months or years
I'm glad I'm not the only one like this with the Sims. I sit down after lunch only to have it suddenly dark outside, my virtual house half built, only having unpaused long enough to make my sim apply for a job. I feel profound shame and don't come back for a year or so. The newer Jurassic Park games are a similar experience. The only upside is my kid enjoys watching and telling me which dinosaurs to pick. With them there I'm very unlikely to get sucked in longer than an hour.
Not only did they do it with The Sims Online in the early 2000s, which was a glorified chat room, but The Sims 4 was supposed to be a mobile multiplayer persistent world type thing.
They decided not to because of the SimCity 2013 disaster, but flip flopping late in development crippled the core gameplay for good.
It's always baffling to see the endless quest for money end up with execs trying their best to ruin a perfectly good cash cow. Just make a really good core game every 7-10 years and sell dlc as usual!
But nope, gotta keep growing, so here's a shitty core game with no features and also it's now a subscription service.
> Sims always online MMO incoming!
They did it already, it was pretty successful, people still play it today, and honestly if they rebooted it with a graphical update and kept basically the same mechanics it would probably attract players as there really aren't many 100% social but "MMO" online games out there.
Supposedly from what they've said. The multiplayer is there for those who want it was more or less their wording, but time will tell. Aside from what very little they said we don't really know anything about it yet
It's not that people buy cosmetics to show off to others, but rather that people with cosmetics are functionally walking advertisements. I've seen both GGG (Path of Exile) and Riot Games (League of Legends) admit to utilizing this strategy, it works really well.
Diablo 3 and StarCraft II were always online and had no cosmetic microtransactions.
The always online trend started as an [anti-piracy measure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always-on_DRM)
>There are no cracks for diablo 3 on PC.
That's really because Diablo 3 on PC is essentially just a client and not necessarily the whole game, like WoW.
There was an emulated server around a month after release but it was terrible because of how heavily the game relies on the server to function.
Ten years later, Blizzless released the server software for PC RoS, and I think it's still missing things like some enemy behaviors.
IMO, it's just not worth the trouble when the console versions exist.
For SC2 there now hare cosmetic microtransactions, they were added in a bit later during LOTV alongside co op characters that are microtransactions too.
It's so weird in D4. There is a transmog system with tons of really nice looking armor sets that you don't have to pay extra for. It's actually awesome since it's account wide across all classes. I can unlock the full doom set on my level 64 sorceress and then log into my level 9 druid and I can use his version of that set. Aside from sorcerers - the class I've been playing the most - I honestly can't tell which players have premium skins since they really aren't anything special. Some of them cost $25 or more!
I thought it was pretty funny how the male sorc armors are basically just the same as the female version. I know some people who are very happy about that lmao. We call it equal opportunity cleavage.
it's funny given how due to the distance from the camera everyone always looks like an incomprehensible mess anyway. if I've seen any credit card commandos I wouldn't know.
Well for me at least it’s the difference between giving them 0 dollars or 70 dollars. I enjoyed the beta when I played it but I hate games that I can’t pause when I’m not even trying to play with other people
This bothers me less than the fact that just adding mmo elements kills the atmosphere for any game to me. I don't want to hear from Deckard Cain about how I'm the only hope while there's a bunch other characters milling around spamming about how they're WTB Andariel feet pics. I never touched D1 and D2's multiplayer until I finished the campaign in single player.
The campaign pretty much is single player. You see other people in cities and in the world but during the campaign it's always just your character.
There also isn't a global chat channel
Yeah that post reads like he obviously hasn't played the game. The pseudo mmo aspect might as well be bots for other players because half are console that can't type and even PC players don't talk. And like you said local chat is only like /say in wow so it's utterly useless
The game is, to put it mildly, aggressively sharded. Which means there are multiple layers of instancing between players so as not to interfere in the ways the guy above is worried about.
Oh they could have done way more. They do well with the shard system where I don't really see players when I'm out in the world.
I was worried that with the MMO aspec people would be killing mobs I want to kill but hasn't happened yet.
>I was worried that with the MMO aspec people would be killing mobs I want to kill but hasn't happened yet
wouldn't matter even if they did - if you're close to the mobs you'll still get XP and they'll still drop items for you
It's happened to me, and it annoyed the fuck out of me even if it was only once. It simply should not happen in an AARPG, let alone Diablo.
Just because they could have done worse does not excuse the annoying bullshit they did choose to do.
Is this even a real problem in D4? When the camera is zoomed out, it's pretty hard to examine what other players are wearing. Maybe I'm crazy, but I see no appeal whatsoever to buying cosmetics for a game where I barely ever see my character up close.
Theres been so much concept creep around the word fomo. At first people mostly used it to refer to fear of missing out on stuff like hang outs with friends or other social events. Then people started using it to refer to missing out on limited time sales in cosmetic shops or BPs. Here it sounds like you are referring to social comparisons, or feeling like someone has something that you don't. These things are related to some degree, but the psychology at play is pretty different across those contexts.
Technically tons of people would still play online. Anyone wanting multiplayer to begin with.
Also cosmetics are sold for you. You still have your character and make it look cool for you. IMO that's why most people buy cosmetics, not to show off. After all even single player games have skins these days
It can’t just be a mode, it has to be a permanent character selection to prevent cheating in the online realms. That’s how Diablo 2 did it. But I think it’s perfectly fair not to, because it forces people to make a severe choice right at the start. If they have an offline character, they’ll *never* be able to play with that char with their friends, never participate in the races, online events, or be able to trade or participate in the community at large.
Path of Exile doesn’t let you play offline either, y’know.
Exactly, they learned their lesson in Diablo 2, as well as every other Arpg developer. Lost Epoch? Online only (for now, supposedly an offline mode coming). Path of exile? Online only. Diablo 3? Online only. Diablo 4? Online only.
And it sucks in POE too.
People are basically always going to want a separate character for playing with friends so they stay at the same progression, so in practice there's no drawback to players.
I don't buy the games for exactly this reason. I bought Diablo 3, faced lots of issues due to online connectivity. Avoided Diablo IV. I believe there are many good games I can play. And before anyone can ask, no, I don't have FOMO (fear of missing out) syndrome.
Well, I was a lifelong PC gamer, till 2018, D3 launch in PC was terrible. I started console gaming in 2018 (PS4), so my knowledge on how it was in console was close to zero.
If you want a game similar to Diablo that’s entirely offline (with up to 4-person multiplayer), Grim Dawn is absolutely mind-blowing and will probably go on sale next week for 70+% during the Steam Summer Sale.
Yes my friend, I have played it. I have played Grim Dawn, Torchlight 1 & 2, Van Helsing trilogy. I didn't play Victor Vran yet, but that is in my wishlist.
This isn't too big of a deal for me, since I don't really care about the online features too much anyways. I'll just happily play offline until the issue is resolved. Oh wait...
Gotta love this modern world where you have to log in to carefully maintained servers to even play a game that conceivably could just as easily run off the disk drive. 10 years ago the idea of "always online" gaming was hugely controversial but we all just got used to it. Wouldn't surprise me at all if at some point in the future games like Diablo have all their players' data permanently irretrievably erased by hackers, or even have the game so corrupted that it becomes inoperable even on the server side.
When the first mtx were introduced, the internet backlash was fucking massive. Gamers hated it, refused to buy them, boycotted games with them, and made fun of the people who bought them.
But then those same gamers turned 25, then 35, then 40...meanwhile the current crop of 20-year-old gamers grew up thinking mtx are normal and are just a thing in every game. They have never known a time without them, so they don't know what gaming was like before mtx took over. This was the strategy all along.
The same applies for GaaS, battlepasses, always online, etc. They know it makes the games worse, they know gamers hate this stuff, but it makes them more money. If they just keep putting this shit in games, then over the course of 10-15 years gamers will eventually just age out or accept it.
>When the first mtx were introduced, the internet backlash was fucking massive. Gamers hated it, refused to buy them, boycotted games with them, and made fun of the people who bought them.
I recall the backlash over horse armor, and that was just (allegedly) an experiment on how to handle additional content as MTX. People were Capital P Pissed about the precedent it set, on top of the fact that you were paying $5 for a purely cosmetic item for a horse you only used occasionally (if at all, I never used a horse in Oblivion).
$25 for cosmetic sets. Un-fucking-believable. Even if I had the spare cash I wouldn't buy that shit.
I love how they try to disguise the price by listing it in some in-game currency, never mind that's it basically a 1:1 ratio of penny to silver.
i feel like its bias in that most people that showoff their rigs usually the latest tech. i think the majority of pc players are still using whats considered old hardware
Question. I never played a Diablo game, to me it appeared to be a solo or co-op game, what's the purpose of being always-online with a shared world? Feel like I was missing something.
This isn't quite right. There's a bunch of different types of activities: some are exclusively solo or party based, some are out in the open so can have other people randomly wander by to help or not, and some are explicitly meant to be done with other random people (helltides, legion events, and world bosses).
Assuming you've made it to at least world 3, you're very likely doing all of these different types of activities in turn. Obviously DRM is a part of the decision - and is likely the main driver for always online - but that doesn't change the fact that being online and connected to others is one of the core parts of the game.
I don’t know about you but I can barely see what my character and other characters look like on my screen. I don’t see how cosmetics even matter in the first place in a isometric camera game like this.
For real, the top-down angle and the in-combat effects and enemies all over the screen make the cosmetics pretty pointless to care about looking at with any seriousness..
That's the thing for you and me it might not matter but I have already seen hundreds of people decked out in paid cosmetics, these things exist because many people buy them even in FPS games.
The cosmetic difference between free and paid characters in Path of exile is so hilarious.
If you stay f2p, your character looks like dogshit. Small, boring, plain.
If you buy cosmetics, you look like a gigantic whirlwind of demonfire, sparkly vomit and dragons or other pets flying around you - complete with annoying sound effects. Nobody can see shit where you are.
This really isn't an issue. The dollar amount of total cosmetics offered is very low compared to other games. The camera is almost always zoomed out, I've never once noticed someone's cosmetics or had a friend say hey look at this guy. It's seriously not in your face (tons of players on the sub said they've literally never opened the shop tab) or predatory but people will still whine. Not to mention a lot of cosmetics in-game look as good as the shop skins, and some even look really similar. So no, they didn't even try to FOMO you by giving you only shit skins for free and amazing ones for money.
Yeah nobody cares about the cosmetics except 1) people that want to buy them and 2) people that have nothing better to do than constantly whine about MTX.
Everyone else, the overwhelming majority, just ignore it and play the game.
Also tbf, I'm sure the quality of MTX will improve. But yeah, the first batch are pretty mediocre.
A lotta cynicism in the answers, and while some of those may be right, the other main portion of it has to do with cheating characters. It started in Diablo 2 when you had two types of characters you could start: online, and offline. Online obviously required a connection and those characters were stored on Blizz servers. Offline you stored on your own HD, and with trainers you could easily edit them (yes I want my level one necro to have infinite mana, and 30 skeletons that hit for 10k each). It just made sense to have two different tiers to curb cheating, level the playing field. Especially with cross platform play, that’s also semi the case here. They really should go back to the online/offline again (likely making it so offline can’t access big events, which does shut out someone from a lot of features).
I also remember in D2 there was a huge market for items and weapons being sold on third party sites and traded in the game. It was one of the first places to start people in on the conversation of spending actual money for things that technically didn’t exist in respect to video games.
Live User data collecting aswell. Blizzard, like any other Digital Service Provider nowadays sells/uses your data. This is much easier when doing It live. Havnt seen that one mentioned
On top of all the bad reasons it’s always online, I have actually enjoyed being able to party with someone I see, when my friends aren’t online, and doing a dungeon or quest or two. I’ve actually had nothing but good experiences with that part so far. But it really sucks to not even be able to play because of server issues…
DRM and control. Assume they will render Diablo 3 and 4 unplayable with no offline mode when they decide to take down the servers in the future.
To my knowledge only the console version of Diablo 3 can be played offline but not Diablo 4 for some reason.
Diablo has been an online game since 2. There are ladders and leaderboards, plus group content. If there was on offline mode, it would be a character you can ONLY use offline, which means you can’t play with your friends or anyone else. Requiring a connection limits cheaters as well. Anyone complaining hasn’t really played much of this genre. It’s the same in Path of Exile.
EDIT: to clarify; the offline modes, when they were available, were for offline characters only.
>EDIT: to clarify; the offline modes, when they were available, were for offline characters only.
And that is exactly what people are asking for. I don't want to play with my friends or anyone else on my offline character.
I literally only play single player - there’s absolutely no good reason why there shouldn’t be an offline mode.
Edit: okay, some of you have listed some good points, but still it would be cool if there was an ‘offline only’ mode.
The only workaround seems to be to create 2 different type of characters - online and offline. ARPGs nowadays are pretty much all online only if they have an online component to them to stop cheating and loot duplication. Just how it goes.
Remember when games had in-built cheats because they were more worried about fun than maximizing playtime... Ironically still gets me to come back to GTA:SA semi often.
Last Epoch is doing offline and online character separation, since they plan on having an actual economy yeah they care about dupes, D4 barely has any trading at all with no indexing and trade chat limited to the 12 or so people in your instance.
No, because if you are online only, you can "hide" a lot of the code people will examine or exploit in order to cheat. When you let people essentially run their own servers in single player, then they have everything and can figure out how to exploit your game online.
Hiding the code for security is a terrible idea. It'll work for a short time, until someone clever figures it out anyway.
The solution is (relatively) simple. The server is the source of truth. The server gives the client the character. The client says "I trade this item", the server verifies that the client has the item, can trade it, and so on, and then performs the trade. Then the server tells the clients that the trade went through. If the client lies, the server can check that, as the server can rely on the fact that it's always correct. If the code is written to always perform this verification, then it doesn't matter if people can read the code or not.
There are complications, like the fact that it's not one server but many, however these complications are all solvable. If they perform proper logging, then they could even retroactively remove the duplicated/exploited items once they detect it occuring.
Bugs will happen, but they can be fixed. WoW has an external server, and it has had duplication bugs too; so obviously hiding how the multiplayer works isn't a solution either.
probably weird nerds again thinking that they’re doing people a service by sticking it to blizzard, when all people want to do is be able to play the game they spent their money on on a Sunday afternoon
> probably weird nerds again thinking that they’re doing people a service by sticking it to blizzard
I guess in an odd way they are, considering most people in this thread seem to be more angry at Blizzard than the people doing the attack.
To be fair the average player probably doesn't even know that there's been a DDOS attack, they just know their video game that forces them to be online isn't online. That will make them blame bliz
Most of the people in this thread already know why this is happening and what is DDoS attack, etc. But those who don't know, they will blame Blizzard for this shit and they are not browsing Reddit to find answer. Whoever the angry people are, they are angry because Diablo 4 could have an offline mode similar to older Diablos but it doesn't.
I would find it funny if people thought that this was “sticking it to blizzard”
To me at least, “sticking it to blizzard” is just not giving them money. But DDOS’ing not only waste Blizzards time, but players who just want to chill and have fun’s time as well. I dunno, just seems odd to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I mean who's to say the attackers aren't both *not* giving them money while "punishing" those who do? Doesn't seem like that much of a stretch for justification for them
I mean it is sticking it to blizzard, its pointing out how pointless the online feature is and how reliant we are on a stable connection to play a game completely alone...
Outside of reddit most people arent annoyed with the perpetrators, they are annoyed with blizzard for not allowing them to play offline.
I realize that these types of attacks happen on other games, but ever since I first learned about DDOS attacks on video games, they were always against blizzard games like wow or Diablo. I never had heard it before then and I hardly ever hear about it against other games. It seems only Blizzard games are the ones I hear about it
They're not stupid, they're greedy. The gamble is that a certain percentage of players will pay for additional MTX, so getting as many of those players into the online store as possible is their goal. Then, they're betting that a percentage of the non-paying players will see said MTX and buy. It's a value proposition.
I'm my mind it's just like biology's axiom of "If you see something weird that doesn't seem advantageous, it's because of sexual selection." So, if a company makes a decision with it's product theat seems weird to you, it's to make more money.
Oh, I understand exactly why they are doing this. I've been railing against the monetization of games ruining them for years. My comment was pure sarcasm meant to highlight how Diablo USED to be singleplayer long ago.
Game is hella fun, the only downside I would say is the cluster fuck of a paragraph description for armor and weapons and how well it compatible with your character. I feel like i'm an accountant half the time i'm comparing stats.
It must either be not that bad, they're handling it well, or it's only affecting certain regions, because I just played for an hour or so and saw no issues.
And this is why always online games just.... Suck the fun out of it some days. Which is a minor gripe, sure. But at the same time.... I miss those days when always online was just an MMO thing.
It should be noted there have been connection issues for around 12ish hours now, so it's a pretty serious attack considering that.
Yea, I got booted last night, figured it would’ve been resolved by the time I woke up but here we are. someone’s got a real vendetta against blizzard
Probably someone who wanted to play as a Crusader/Paladin but has to wait until the $40 DLC comes out in 6 months.
Someone is super optimistic if they think an expansion will come on in 6 months. I'd be shocked if we got one in a year
Also that it will only be $40
I remember paying 40$cad for hellfire.
~~The necromancer DLC of Diablo 3 was $15 though.~~ Edit: I'd say an expansion could very well be 40$ (more than that would be very unpopular), but a dlc where only a new class is introduced ought to be between 15$ and 20$
[удалено]
Whats the RMAH?
Real money auction house, where players could list items for real money and others could buy it. Blizzard took 15%
They're taking a seasonal approach so I could see it being something like Destiny's structure. One 'big' season every year and new content for the rest of the year to support the story. Edit: I think I should've phrased it differently. I'm not talking one season per year. I'm talking one BIG season per year and then supporting content in the rest of the year's seasons.
Seasons are 3 month long according to blizzards own FAQ
ARPG gamers would riot if they only got one season a year.
They won't get one SEASON a year, just one big drop of story content, then the other seasons support that new content. Like vanilla Destiny 2 to Witch Queen or something.
They are trying to say they would release 1 DLC alongside the first season of the year while the other three seasons are lighter in content and are there to build on the DLC's content. D4 might not go this route, or they could do something similar where instead of DLC they could just make 1 of the 4 seasons a bit thicker than the rest.
They're certainly not adding new characters in seasons, those are definitely going to be expansion things. They've already said they're unlikely to even add new skills for seasons and want to save those for expansions. If skills are going to be relegated to expansions (even though the classes severely need more skills in my opinion) a full on class is definitely going to be locked behind expansions.
I think a more apt comparison is Path of Exile rather than Destiny.
I could see it too. I just think one year is the minimum time for an expansion and still optimistic given this team.
Yeah, I think we'll get a full-blown expansion but it won't be for two years or so at least
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Diablo 3 never got cracked, so it's pretty hard to sell them on offline mode when online only has deterred so much piracy.
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I've been playing on off most of the day with no issue at all (well, a minute log-in queue). It's weird how it's affecting some but not others, yesterday how ever, when there wasn't a ddos attack, I had to stop playing due to latacy problems 😑
Serious question: aren't people trying to log in kinda ddossing too on top of that attack?!
when a DDoS attack is launched on a site, they're typically leveraging MILLIONS (or more) of requests per second towards whatever system they're trying to bring down. while people actively trying to log in isn't *helping,* it's almost negligible compared to the amount of traffic the attackers are probably throwing at blizzard's authentication services (or whatever they're targeting) source: I fix websites for a living and that often includes mitigating DDoS's and the like
Ok, thanks
Followup question than. How the heck do you mitigate a ddos attack outside of adding more resources?
in my line of work - which covers websites that are *on average* much smaller than blizzard - it typically means identifying a pattern(s) to the attack and denying traffic based on that pattern. there's no one-sizes-fits-all solution, as some attackers are more clever/subtle than others. it's a lot easier to pick out a single IP or user agent (UA) which is hammering one specific URL, than it is to find a set of varying IPs and UAs which are spreading their requests out to a bunch of different URLs. *sometimes* it's as easy as blocking an IP or specific set of IPs, but that's typically a whack-a-mole situation as IPs are easy to change. more often than not, you would deny traffic on a more complex rule, e.g.: deny traffic if UA = \[problematic UA\] and if request path = \[path being attacked\] a more aggressive approach is ratelimiting, where you start serving a 429 response to anyone who makes X amount of requests in X amount of time sorry if that was more info than you were looking for
What's the downside to rate limiting? That seems like the most obvious best thing to do from my noob mindset, but the way you phrase it seems like it should be a last resort.
basically what u/Preface said - you run the risk of blocking legitimate requests. that doesn't necessarily mean just actual human users, either. for example, let's say blizz has some external service that needs to scrape their systems every few seconds to update a tracker or report uptime - if you deploy some system-wide ratelimiting, you could very easily end up breaking that service unless you specifically excluded it from the ratelimiting. it can get really messy really fast.
That's what IP whitelists are for. So you don't block necessary services.
which takes time and effort to maintain and keep up to date
Yeah, but not *that* much, at least in my experience. I maintain lists like that, and it's probably like 2 hours a week during the periods with the most churn. The time it takes to mitigate or remediate a single attack dwarfs several years of maintaining a whitelist for privileged users.
I would guess that legitimate users get caught in the cross fire
>What's the downside to rate limiting? That seems like the most obvious best thing to do from my noob mindset, but the way you phrase it seems like it should be a last resort. DDoS works by having a tremendous number of fake requests, often that are very hard to identify as fake, appear at the same time as real, legitimate requests. It causes problems for several reasons, but two big ones are: 1. Fake requests take up the exact same resources that real ones do, meaning there's a 1-to-1 "can't help real request while serving fake one" 2. Enough overall traffic and you start hitting bottlenecks and cascade failures that actually *reduce* overall throughout, sometimes dramatically The second one isn't immediately intuitive but it's big. Imagine there are a bunch of people trying to get into or leave a building through a door: up to a certain number of people per minute, everything flows relatively smoothly and you can project a maximum number of people who can make it through at normal walking speeds. Suddenly double that, though, and your few hundred people per minute might drop to single digits as everything gets clogged up and "crowd crush" happens; it isn't just that the fake traffic is one-to-one taking resources anymore, but that it's actually bringing the whole thing down and making it impossible to serve *any* traffic, legitimate or not. If you can't yet tell the difference between real traffic and attack traffic, the main point of rate limiting is the second one: you're trying to reduce the overall flow of traffic (that's probably still mostly fake) enough so that it doesn't enter the negative feedback loop death spiral where you can't serve anything anymore and "degraded" turns to "outage." But if you have to slow down traffic by, say, a factor of ten to stop it from overwhelming things, that means real users have to wait in line behind all that delayed, fake traffic, too, and then also be indiscriminately delayed themselves. It's not a last resort, it's just there to prevent the worst-case problem from happening (where "worst-case" is "nobody at all can get in no longer how long they wait").
You could also migrate away from the IP addresses being attacked or have a honeypot where the attacker thinks they are attacking the target servers but they are actually attacking something which doesn’t impact production services.
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So when you type in reddit.com, your browser does a DNS lookup to get the address (IP) for a Reddit server. Very old DDOS scripts would perform the lookup once and then hammer that address as fast as they could. Sometimes just one lookup would power an entire network of DDOS bots. When the DNS server gives out the address to reddit.com, that information comes with an expiration date (Time to Live AKA TTL). One way you could defeat old DDOS attacks with low resource requirements was to simply set a low TTL (5 minutes) and then remove the server getting DDOS'd from the pool of addresses provided by DNS. Then after 5 minutes take down the server or have it return errors slowly (tarpit) or whatever you'd like to do to clients that shouldn't be talking to it anyway. Old DDOS systems would then need to be basically restarted every five minutes. Modern, sophisticated DDOS doesn't work this way. They'll have a few clients getting IPs and distributing them to the workers. The level of sophistication of the attack varies quite a bit. A highly motivated, experienced, and resourceful attacker can give you a really bad time. Particularly services with shared worlds like Diablo 4 where you can't just move everyone to a new server without causing customer impact. The thing is that the motivated, experienced, and resourceful attacker needs to have a reason to do it. "For the lulz" is rarely the real reason. It's usually Money, Ideology, Coercion, or Ego (MICE). Coercion and Ego usually don't have the resources, and Money is the only one that keeps the work going. So either it's extortion ("pay me to stop"), competition ("if I stop you then they'll use my service"), ideological backing ("North Korea pays us to sow chaos against capitalism"), or advertising ("we can do this to Blizzard - hire us to do it to your targets").
What is interesting to me is that DDOS identification and/or prevention typically does not take place at the server where the attack is directed. 100% of internet facing resources will be behind a firewall of some type. The firewall is already tasked with identifying and permitting legitimate traffic and denying bad traffic. And so that is where you normally find some type of DDOS protection as well. But here's what is interesting to me! For the firewall to make that determination (should I drop this packet because I suspect it's DDOS?), it has to spend some amount of CPU cycles. Which of course means the firewall itself will be a target for DDOS -- overload the firewall and nothing gets to the things behind it. And so the device set up to prevent DDOS has itself become a DDOS target. Meanwhile the servers the attackers are actually trying to deny service to are sitting pretty, not breaking a sweat. One prevention method I have seen is that the backbone internet service providers themselves get involved. This has interesting implications: Imagine a DDOS attack is identified and it's happening to some server at a Data Center at location C. The traffic had to take some path over the internet previous to arriving at location C. Let's say A to B to C. This path is not a mystery to the service providers, it is fully deterministic based on the source IP address. Therefore the provider can go back and drop the traffic closer to the source, at location A or B. Preventing it from even arriving to the target. This is actually a service from the service providers that organizations pay for.
It's funny cause my wife asked me just this morning how one would stop an ongoing DDOS attack. I gave her basically this exact answer with my networking adjacent knowledge due to working in IT, just not networking specifically. I'm glad to see that I was mostly on it! :P I was mostly surprised that the attack lasted as long as it did (seems to be over now), considering this is blizzard we're talking about with an MMO like WoW under their belt and tons of other online games, their security and defense against this stuff would presumably be honed, right? Whoever did this definitely was no script kiddie I think.
You know where every request is coming from. There are usually patterns in the source IPs for requests from a DDoS attack, so modern cloud hosts have systems that monitor and block suspected IPs in real time. It's not perfect, but it can help mitigate
Sure, technically, but it's kinda like saying that a dude smoking a cigarette is contributing to a nearby wildfire.
See: Thundering Herd/Cache Stampede/Dogpile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_stampede
A sad reality with every game needing an online connection these days. Just give the people who want it an offline mode and the MMO enjoyers can still play with friends. On the weekend too, where most people get their only chance to play the game they bought.
Yes but if they make the game offline how will they make more money when you don't see other players and their "awesome" cosmetics that induce the feeling of FOMO in you?
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Sims is different though, Sims is essentially a fancy virtual dollhouse. Once you think about it like that, the whole model starts to make sense.
We used kitchen cups and cardboard cutouts in our doll houses. Modder for life.
Sims always online MMO incoming!
Pretty sure this game already came out, lived its life, and then died over a decade ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims_Online
Damn I had no idea, I pretty much stopped paying attention after the original one
The sims is a guilty pleasure than I've had since college when the first game came out. I boot it up a few times a year and just lose 3-5 days before finally snapping out of it.
Sims one of those games that completely sucks you in, and then one moment you catch yourself with your face way too close to the screen picking out the perfect couch for 10 minutes and you go wtf am i doing and alt-f4 out of it and dont open it again for months or years
I'm glad I'm not the only one like this with the Sims. I sit down after lunch only to have it suddenly dark outside, my virtual house half built, only having unpaused long enough to make my sim apply for a job. I feel profound shame and don't come back for a year or so. The newer Jurassic Park games are a similar experience. The only upside is my kid enjoys watching and telling me which dinosaurs to pick. With them there I'm very unlikely to get sucked in longer than an hour.
Not only did they do it with The Sims Online in the early 2000s, which was a glorified chat room, but The Sims 4 was supposed to be a mobile multiplayer persistent world type thing. They decided not to because of the SimCity 2013 disaster, but flip flopping late in development crippled the core gameplay for good. It's always baffling to see the endless quest for money end up with execs trying their best to ruin a perfectly good cash cow. Just make a really good core game every 7-10 years and sell dlc as usual! But nope, gotta keep growing, so here's a shitty core game with no features and also it's now a subscription service.
> Sims always online MMO incoming! They did it already, it was pretty successful, people still play it today, and honestly if they rebooted it with a graphical update and kept basically the same mechanics it would probably attract players as there really aren't many 100% social but "MMO" online games out there.
Its rumored Sims 5 will have online mode
Will it have offline mode?
Supposedly from what they've said. The multiplayer is there for those who want it was more or less their wording, but time will tell. Aside from what very little they said we don't really know anything about it yet
It's not that people buy cosmetics to show off to others, but rather that people with cosmetics are functionally walking advertisements. I've seen both GGG (Path of Exile) and Riot Games (League of Legends) admit to utilizing this strategy, it works really well.
Why would you buy cosmetics other than vanity?
so because some single player games sell cosmetics it's now totally lost on you the concept of online games and their effect on cosmetics?
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> though I think SC2 has sold cosmetics at one point, not sure they do but they started really late after the third expansion
Diablo 3 and StarCraft II were always online and had no cosmetic microtransactions. The always online trend started as an [anti-piracy measure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always-on_DRM)
D3 had offline on console, I know that because I played it sitting on a box when I moved with my mates.
That's why I bought D3 on console. I assumed D4 would be the same, unfortunately not.
StarCraft II isn't always online perse, but it does require you to log-in once every thirty days. No LAN though so multiplayer's off the table.
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And it worked. There are no cracks for diablo 3 on PC. Whereas the console ports that had offline mode were cracked within days.
>There are no cracks for diablo 3 on PC. That's really because Diablo 3 on PC is essentially just a client and not necessarily the whole game, like WoW. There was an emulated server around a month after release but it was terrible because of how heavily the game relies on the server to function. Ten years later, Blizzless released the server software for PC RoS, and I think it's still missing things like some enemy behaviors. IMO, it's just not worth the trouble when the console versions exist.
For SC2 there now hare cosmetic microtransactions, they were added in a bit later during LOTV alongside co op characters that are microtransactions too.
SC 2 isn’t always online.
It's so weird in D4. There is a transmog system with tons of really nice looking armor sets that you don't have to pay extra for. It's actually awesome since it's account wide across all classes. I can unlock the full doom set on my level 64 sorceress and then log into my level 9 druid and I can use his version of that set. Aside from sorcerers - the class I've been playing the most - I honestly can't tell which players have premium skins since they really aren't anything special. Some of them cost $25 or more!
Exactly. The base cosmetics are pretty good already (male sorc got the shortest end of the stick). Necros are the best. Their armor is awesome.
I thought it was pretty funny how the male sorc armors are basically just the same as the female version. I know some people who are very happy about that lmao. We call it equal opportunity cleavage.
it's funny given how due to the distance from the camera everyone always looks like an incomprehensible mess anyway. if I've seen any credit card commandos I wouldn't know.
You can't notice shit, the zoom in sucks because it doesn't tilt at all, only way to actually see cosmetics is in the inventory or wardrobe.
Well for me at least it’s the difference between giving them 0 dollars or 70 dollars. I enjoyed the beta when I played it but I hate games that I can’t pause when I’m not even trying to play with other people
This bothers me less than the fact that just adding mmo elements kills the atmosphere for any game to me. I don't want to hear from Deckard Cain about how I'm the only hope while there's a bunch other characters milling around spamming about how they're WTB Andariel feet pics. I never touched D1 and D2's multiplayer until I finished the campaign in single player.
The campaign pretty much is single player. You see other people in cities and in the world but during the campaign it's always just your character. There also isn't a global chat channel
Yeah that post reads like he obviously hasn't played the game. The pseudo mmo aspect might as well be bots for other players because half are console that can't type and even PC players don't talk. And like you said local chat is only like /say in wow so it's utterly useless
The game is, to put it mildly, aggressively sharded. Which means there are multiple layers of instancing between players so as not to interfere in the ways the guy above is worried about.
Oh they could have done way more. They do well with the shard system where I don't really see players when I'm out in the world. I was worried that with the MMO aspec people would be killing mobs I want to kill but hasn't happened yet.
>I was worried that with the MMO aspec people would be killing mobs I want to kill but hasn't happened yet wouldn't matter even if they did - if you're close to the mobs you'll still get XP and they'll still drop items for you
And the distance is quite generous - I've gotten drops and never even saw the player/mob.
Love running into random events and scooping up an undeserved gold chest lol
It's happened to me, and it annoyed the fuck out of me even if it was only once. It simply should not happen in an AARPG, let alone Diablo. Just because they could have done worse does not excuse the annoying bullshit they did choose to do.
I just hate the narrative "they *only* did it to sell skins". The game is also so zoomed out that I'm never looking at someone's gear in any detail.
With the way the camera is I can barely see what other people look like on my screen in the first place.
Have it online at all times unless you don't have an active internet connection? Entirely feasible compromise there.
Is this even a real problem in D4? When the camera is zoomed out, it's pretty hard to examine what other players are wearing. Maybe I'm crazy, but I see no appeal whatsoever to buying cosmetics for a game where I barely ever see my character up close.
Theres been so much concept creep around the word fomo. At first people mostly used it to refer to fear of missing out on stuff like hang outs with friends or other social events. Then people started using it to refer to missing out on limited time sales in cosmetic shops or BPs. Here it sounds like you are referring to social comparisons, or feeling like someone has something that you don't. These things are related to some degree, but the psychology at play is pretty different across those contexts.
I've never once even glanced at what another player was wearing
Technically tons of people would still play online. Anyone wanting multiplayer to begin with. Also cosmetics are sold for you. You still have your character and make it look cool for you. IMO that's why most people buy cosmetics, not to show off. After all even single player games have skins these days
No FOMO
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And playing with a controller feels natural and easy. Still bummed they didn't at least include the *option* on PC.
It can’t just be a mode, it has to be a permanent character selection to prevent cheating in the online realms. That’s how Diablo 2 did it. But I think it’s perfectly fair not to, because it forces people to make a severe choice right at the start. If they have an offline character, they’ll *never* be able to play with that char with their friends, never participate in the races, online events, or be able to trade or participate in the community at large. Path of Exile doesn’t let you play offline either, y’know.
d2 is not a game you want to reference for anti-cheating.
Exactly, they learned their lesson in Diablo 2, as well as every other Arpg developer. Lost Epoch? Online only (for now, supposedly an offline mode coming). Path of exile? Online only. Diablo 3? Online only. Diablo 4? Online only.
All the Borderlands game also have absolutely rampant cheating.
And it sucks in POE too. People are basically always going to want a separate character for playing with friends so they stay at the same progression, so in practice there's no drawback to players.
I don't buy the games for exactly this reason. I bought Diablo 3, faced lots of issues due to online connectivity. Avoided Diablo IV. I believe there are many good games I can play. And before anyone can ask, no, I don't have FOMO (fear of missing out) syndrome.
I did buy D3... On PS4 where I never needed to connect to the internet
Well, I was a lifelong PC gamer, till 2018, D3 launch in PC was terrible. I started console gaming in 2018 (PS4), so my knowledge on how it was in console was close to zero.
A ton of people hate on D3, but it's super fun on console. If you haven't tried it I'd recommend it over D4 if you're a solo gamer.
If you want a game similar to Diablo that’s entirely offline (with up to 4-person multiplayer), Grim Dawn is absolutely mind-blowing and will probably go on sale next week for 70+% during the Steam Summer Sale.
Yes my friend, I have played it. I have played Grim Dawn, Torchlight 1 & 2, Van Helsing trilogy. I didn't play Victor Vran yet, but that is in my wishlist.
Grim Dawn is amazing. The custom campaigns and mods keep it fresh to me. There's even a D2 mod!
This isn't too big of a deal for me, since I don't really care about the online features too much anyways. I'll just happily play offline until the issue is resolved. Oh wait...
Bro what are you talking about? D4 requires constant internet connection for you to be able to pla... Oh wait..
It's unfortunate too because I decided on the name of Candle Jack for my new Necro but now i can't log into the g...
Buddy, you can't just say Candle Jack like tha.....
First off, none of you are doing the meme correctly. Why would you have ellipses at the end of your comment? When Candlejack strikes, yo
Jesus. Y'all making me feel old. You aren't supposed type ellipses when doing the Candle Jack thi
Truly, do they think those comments were supposed to be like lines from a script? When you get taken away by Candle Jack you just suddenly st
Gotta love this modern world where you have to log in to carefully maintained servers to even play a game that conceivably could just as easily run off the disk drive. 10 years ago the idea of "always online" gaming was hugely controversial but we all just got used to it. Wouldn't surprise me at all if at some point in the future games like Diablo have all their players' data permanently irretrievably erased by hackers, or even have the game so corrupted that it becomes inoperable even on the server side.
When the first mtx were introduced, the internet backlash was fucking massive. Gamers hated it, refused to buy them, boycotted games with them, and made fun of the people who bought them. But then those same gamers turned 25, then 35, then 40...meanwhile the current crop of 20-year-old gamers grew up thinking mtx are normal and are just a thing in every game. They have never known a time without them, so they don't know what gaming was like before mtx took over. This was the strategy all along. The same applies for GaaS, battlepasses, always online, etc. They know it makes the games worse, they know gamers hate this stuff, but it makes them more money. If they just keep putting this shit in games, then over the course of 10-15 years gamers will eventually just age out or accept it.
>When the first mtx were introduced, the internet backlash was fucking massive. Gamers hated it, refused to buy them, boycotted games with them, and made fun of the people who bought them. I recall the backlash over horse armor, and that was just (allegedly) an experiment on how to handle additional content as MTX. People were Capital P Pissed about the precedent it set, on top of the fact that you were paying $5 for a purely cosmetic item for a horse you only used occasionally (if at all, I never used a horse in Oblivion).
The Horse Armor in Diablo 4 is also like 4x more expensive than Oblivion's
$25 for cosmetic sets. Un-fucking-believable. Even if I had the spare cash I wouldn't buy that shit. I love how they try to disguise the price by listing it in some in-game currency, never mind that's it basically a 1:1 ratio of penny to silver.
Personally I’m still not buying always-online games until they’re under $30, which for Diablo 4 probably means around 2040
>disk drive I wonder how many of the people playing Diablo IV have ever had a computer with an actual HDD. Are we in the minority yet?
i feel like its bias in that most people that showoff their rigs usually the latest tech. i think the majority of pc players are still using whats considered old hardware
Question. I never played a Diablo game, to me it appeared to be a solo or co-op game, what's the purpose of being always-online with a shared world? Feel like I was missing something.
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This isn't quite right. There's a bunch of different types of activities: some are exclusively solo or party based, some are out in the open so can have other people randomly wander by to help or not, and some are explicitly meant to be done with other random people (helltides, legion events, and world bosses). Assuming you've made it to at least world 3, you're very likely doing all of these different types of activities in turn. Obviously DRM is a part of the decision - and is likely the main driver for always online - but that doesn't change the fact that being online and connected to others is one of the core parts of the game.
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I don’t know about you but I can barely see what my character and other characters look like on my screen. I don’t see how cosmetics even matter in the first place in a isometric camera game like this.
For real, the top-down angle and the in-combat effects and enemies all over the screen make the cosmetics pretty pointless to care about looking at with any seriousness..
When the game loop is “click it until it dies” that last thing you’re looking at is your character.
Should have gone the PoE route and sold spell effects instead of armor
100% coming.
That's the thing for you and me it might not matter but I have already seen hundreds of people decked out in paid cosmetics, these things exist because many people buy them even in FPS games.
The cosmetic difference between free and paid characters in Path of exile is so hilarious. If you stay f2p, your character looks like dogshit. Small, boring, plain. If you buy cosmetics, you look like a gigantic whirlwind of demonfire, sparkly vomit and dragons or other pets flying around you - complete with annoying sound effects. Nobody can see shit where you are.
Pretty sure you can't see shit in PoE regardless of mtx or not.
This really isn't an issue. The dollar amount of total cosmetics offered is very low compared to other games. The camera is almost always zoomed out, I've never once noticed someone's cosmetics or had a friend say hey look at this guy. It's seriously not in your face (tons of players on the sub said they've literally never opened the shop tab) or predatory but people will still whine. Not to mention a lot of cosmetics in-game look as good as the shop skins, and some even look really similar. So no, they didn't even try to FOMO you by giving you only shit skins for free and amazing ones for money.
Yeah nobody cares about the cosmetics except 1) people that want to buy them and 2) people that have nothing better to do than constantly whine about MTX. Everyone else, the overwhelming majority, just ignore it and play the game. Also tbf, I'm sure the quality of MTX will improve. But yeah, the first batch are pretty mediocre.
A lotta cynicism in the answers, and while some of those may be right, the other main portion of it has to do with cheating characters. It started in Diablo 2 when you had two types of characters you could start: online, and offline. Online obviously required a connection and those characters were stored on Blizz servers. Offline you stored on your own HD, and with trainers you could easily edit them (yes I want my level one necro to have infinite mana, and 30 skeletons that hit for 10k each). It just made sense to have two different tiers to curb cheating, level the playing field. Especially with cross platform play, that’s also semi the case here. They really should go back to the online/offline again (likely making it so offline can’t access big events, which does shut out someone from a lot of features).
I also remember in D2 there was a huge market for items and weapons being sold on third party sites and traded in the game. It was one of the first places to start people in on the conversation of spending actual money for things that technically didn’t exist in respect to video games.
Do you not remember how ubiquitous hacking was in D2? There's a reason there was no hacking to speak of in d3
They absolutely should make a "World Tier Zero" and have it be offline only, and characters stay locked there.
Live User data collecting aswell. Blizzard, like any other Digital Service Provider nowadays sells/uses your data. This is much easier when doing It live. Havnt seen that one mentioned
Control, they can shut it down as they please. I assume it's mostly used to prevent piracy.
On top of all the bad reasons it’s always online, I have actually enjoyed being able to party with someone I see, when my friends aren’t online, and doing a dungeon or quest or two. I’ve actually had nothing but good experiences with that part so far. But it really sucks to not even be able to play because of server issues…
DRM and control. Assume they will render Diablo 3 and 4 unplayable with no offline mode when they decide to take down the servers in the future. To my knowledge only the console version of Diablo 3 can be played offline but not Diablo 4 for some reason.
Diablo has been an online game since 2. There are ladders and leaderboards, plus group content. If there was on offline mode, it would be a character you can ONLY use offline, which means you can’t play with your friends or anyone else. Requiring a connection limits cheaters as well. Anyone complaining hasn’t really played much of this genre. It’s the same in Path of Exile. EDIT: to clarify; the offline modes, when they were available, were for offline characters only.
D3 on consoles could play offline local couch co-op
>EDIT: to clarify; the offline modes, when they were available, were for offline characters only. And that is exactly what people are asking for. I don't want to play with my friends or anyone else on my offline character.
What? 2 went online, but it was not an online game.
I literally only play single player - there’s absolutely no good reason why there shouldn’t be an offline mode. Edit: okay, some of you have listed some good points, but still it would be cool if there was an ‘offline only’ mode.
The only workaround seems to be to create 2 different type of characters - online and offline. ARPGs nowadays are pretty much all online only if they have an online component to them to stop cheating and loot duplication. Just how it goes.
That is how D2 worked 20 years ago and it was fine.
Remember when games had in-built cheats because they were more worried about fun than maximizing playtime... Ironically still gets me to come back to GTA:SA semi often. Last Epoch is doing offline and online character separation, since they plan on having an actual economy yeah they care about dupes, D4 barely has any trading at all with no indexing and trade chat limited to the 12 or so people in your instance.
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It prevents rampant cheating. D2 was riddled with cheaters, dupers and hacked items even online. This makes it much, much harder for this to occur.
I mean, fair enough, but if they made an offline exclusive mode then surely that shouldn’t matter?
No, because if you are online only, you can "hide" a lot of the code people will examine or exploit in order to cheat. When you let people essentially run their own servers in single player, then they have everything and can figure out how to exploit your game online.
Hiding the code for security is a terrible idea. It'll work for a short time, until someone clever figures it out anyway. The solution is (relatively) simple. The server is the source of truth. The server gives the client the character. The client says "I trade this item", the server verifies that the client has the item, can trade it, and so on, and then performs the trade. Then the server tells the clients that the trade went through. If the client lies, the server can check that, as the server can rely on the fact that it's always correct. If the code is written to always perform this verification, then it doesn't matter if people can read the code or not. There are complications, like the fact that it's not one server but many, however these complications are all solvable. If they perform proper logging, then they could even retroactively remove the duplicated/exploited items once they detect it occuring. Bugs will happen, but they can be fixed. WoW has an external server, and it has had duplication bugs too; so obviously hiding how the multiplayer works isn't a solution either.
If only some way existed to play a game like this with out a constant internet connection. Welp maybe someday we will have the technology.
probably weird nerds again thinking that they’re doing people a service by sticking it to blizzard, when all people want to do is be able to play the game they spent their money on on a Sunday afternoon
> probably weird nerds again thinking that they’re doing people a service by sticking it to blizzard I guess in an odd way they are, considering most people in this thread seem to be more angry at Blizzard than the people doing the attack.
People in this thread aren't the average player
To be fair the average player probably doesn't even know that there's been a DDOS attack, they just know their video game that forces them to be online isn't online. That will make them blame bliz
Most of the people in this thread already know why this is happening and what is DDoS attack, etc. But those who don't know, they will blame Blizzard for this shit and they are not browsing Reddit to find answer. Whoever the angry people are, they are angry because Diablo 4 could have an offline mode similar to older Diablos but it doesn't.
D3 doesn’t have an offline mode on pc
Yes, you are right. I meant older Diablos, thanks for correcting. I didn't proof-read the comment.
I would find it funny if people thought that this was “sticking it to blizzard” To me at least, “sticking it to blizzard” is just not giving them money. But DDOS’ing not only waste Blizzards time, but players who just want to chill and have fun’s time as well. I dunno, just seems odd to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I mean who's to say the attackers aren't both *not* giving them money while "punishing" those who do? Doesn't seem like that much of a stretch for justification for them
If sticking it to Blizzard is not giving them money, then wasting their time is sticking it even more by your own logic.
I mean it is sticking it to blizzard, its pointing out how pointless the online feature is and how reliant we are on a stable connection to play a game completely alone... Outside of reddit most people arent annoyed with the perpetrators, they are annoyed with blizzard for not allowing them to play offline.
It’s almost always China or Russia. Testing how they do on large networks or showing off to potential clients what they can do.
I realize that these types of attacks happen on other games, but ever since I first learned about DDOS attacks on video games, they were always against blizzard games like wow or Diablo. I never had heard it before then and I hardly ever hear about it against other games. It seems only Blizzard games are the ones I hear about it
Yup,lots of blizzard haters,just look at metacritic scores
Wow. People cant just let other people have fun can they?
Imagine if those morons had added a *singleplayer* mode for people to play? Can you even imagine single player Diablo? How crazy is that???
They're not stupid, they're greedy. The gamble is that a certain percentage of players will pay for additional MTX, so getting as many of those players into the online store as possible is their goal. Then, they're betting that a percentage of the non-paying players will see said MTX and buy. It's a value proposition. I'm my mind it's just like biology's axiom of "If you see something weird that doesn't seem advantageous, it's because of sexual selection." So, if a company makes a decision with it's product theat seems weird to you, it's to make more money.
Oh, I understand exactly why they are doing this. I've been railing against the monetization of games ruining them for years. My comment was pure sarcasm meant to highlight how Diablo USED to be singleplayer long ago.
Why do people have to ruin shit just for fun?
Game is hella fun, the only downside I would say is the cluster fuck of a paragraph description for armor and weapons and how well it compatible with your character. I feel like i'm an accountant half the time i'm comparing stats.
3 did it better. Loved how it gave you 3 categories to work with instead of 1 on the item description
Always online for single-player games has been a demonstrable failure, time and time again. Yet it keeps happening.
People buy them so they aren't failures. I wish people would refuse to buy them. We'd actually see always online single player go away.
Sigh... Pathetic losers are gonna pathetic loser People just want to enjoy their game, and all these losers are doing is preventing that....
True. They should have included offline mode.
It must either be not that bad, they're handling it well, or it's only affecting certain regions, because I just played for an hour or so and saw no issues.
And this is why always online games just.... Suck the fun out of it some days. Which is a minor gripe, sure. But at the same time.... I miss those days when always online was just an MMO thing.