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"Always On" and food for thought

by Cody Miller @, Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Friday, March 08, 2013, 11:12 (4038 days ago) @ kapowaz

Like Diablo 3, running critical code server side is without question an anti-piracy move.


I'd question that it has anything to do with piracy in the case of the always-on requirement with Diablo III, which I suspect Bungie will have something in common with: a strong desire to guarantee the integrity of the game state data.

Going back a few years, Diablo II had a major problem with item duplication due to locally-run exploits. There were also black markets for item trading, through eBay and other places. Knowing that people would want to trade items for real money whether or not they gave it their blessing, Blizzard decided to incorporate a real money auction house in-game, but that necessitated having pretty strong confidence in the integrity of the game systems. It's no good having a RMAH if it's trivially easy to duplicate a bunch of high-demand items and then sell them — it'd ruin the game for everyone.

Partially. Your theory is flawed because in Diablo 2, single player characters could not be taken onto the ranked realms. They were separate for that reason. Any items duplicated offline could not be brought online to ranked realms (only 'open' unranked ones). Diablo 3 has already had duping problems. This doesn't solve it. Of course, if there was the equivalent of the 'open' battle.net that existed for Diablo 2, nobody in their right mind would pay for items when you could simply hack your character and play with your friends as you could in D2. So, yes it's because of the auction house, but not in the way I think you think. Being able to play offline means people doing so won't buy shit because they can get it for free.

The lack of an always-online requirement for the PS4 version of Diablo III has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with the PS4 being a closed system that's far less likely (impossible?) to reverse engineer the loot system for, and so the auction house is safer. That's assuming they're even going to launch a RMAH for Diablo III on PS4 — maybe they're not, and that's another reason they're happy with it running entirely locally?

No auction house, which yes, that and no piracy is why there is no online requirement.


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