Heh… Authentication encryption, “online connection” DRM, regional IP detection, and a 24-hour network team… Diablo 3 was hacked in less than a week.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012- … ems-stolen
Rawr!
Way to go, Blizzard. Alienate your customers by making them log into a server to play a single-player game they BOUGHT in a STORE, be unable to keep the goddamn servers working for even that early crucial period and in the ends it turns out you didn’t even secure it that well.
Utterly pathetic. In what other single-player games can someone hack into your account and stop you from playing it? >_>
Glad I didn’t get the game, though that was because I’ve never played any in the series. Is this series any good?
I’m playing and enjoying it, when it works. I feel like Diablo 2 w/ the expansion is the strongest experience in the series, but that may be me looking through rose tinted glasses. This is the only single player experience I’ve ever experienced lag in, been unable to play due to server outages, and now have the chance to get all my gold/gear removed due to hacking. Also, the narrative devices used to make the plot progress are really, really, overused and bad. (ie, You’ve just spent a good chunk of time collecting three pieces of a sword when all of a sudden a villain appears in front of your character and tells you that she’s taken all the pieces of the sword & captured all your friends off screen. It completely disregards the fact that you’ve already been shown to be her superior at basically everything.)
There is A cool reveal later in the story, but the game ends without me knowing what happens to one of the players involved in it.
I know that there’s a multiplayer component to the game, but until I hit the Hell/Inferno difficulty, I have no desire to play cooperatively with anyone, and haven’t joined a public game yet. So all in all, it’s a fun game, but there are some serious issues with it, even from a single player perspective.
lol… another news writer, this one from the Examiner, had their account hacked:
http://www.examiner.com/article/account … o-3-hacked
This is too much fun! Remember kids: online DRM is for your protection. :lol:
Word on the street, is that you shouldn’t. Playing public games is evidently one of the “common denominators” of people getting hacked or session high-jacked. Especially those who PUG.
It’s true! If it weren’t for the online DRM, I would probably have gotten the game (I loved Diablo) and found out all these problems first-hand.
Although I guess it wouldn’t have these problems if it didn’t have the DRM.
That said, I don’t have that much of a problem with DRM myself- but, here’s the crucial thing. I’ve bought and played many eroges with DRM. I couldn’t give a number, it’s easily in the dozens. I could probably get an idea by listing my games on dlsite and gyutto but even that isn’t all of them.
Not one of them has ever stopped me from playing because the servers were experiencing issues, down, whatever. I’ve been able to just play my game as I would a single player game. Most of the time I don’t even notice the DRM and when I do it just takes me a few seconds to enter my username and password, possibly because I moved the game between computers and because of that it forgot. No problems.
Now, let’s look at Western games with DRM. Every release I hear about people unable to play the game because of connection issues. These are widespread issues, I read about them multiple places and I often know someone that has experienced them. I myself experienced issues with Mass Effect 3, although that bothered me far less than the fact that the overall game was a thermonuclear landmine.
Yeah, sure, Western games are far more popular and will have many more people logging in. That is absolutely no excuse whatsoever because these same games also bring in a lot more money! Hundreds if not thousands of times as much easily, and that’s just in preorders. So the companies can afford to buy huge numbers of servers, colocated all around the world with the most expensive fault tolerance money can buy. There is absolutely no excuse for the entire online capability - and hence, the only way to legally play the game in question - to be disabled, even if it’s just for seconds, much less hours. A game like Diablo 3 I would expect to have no fewer than 1000 high-end servers around the globe, making maximum use of inherent fault tolerance that the Internet provides and able to withstand massive amounts of congestion, harddrive failures, coloc centres losing power (and backup power somehow), telecom engineers destroying fiber backbones during maintenance, root name servers being blown up by terrorists etc. and with full distribution of resources so that even if there are serious problems people will still be able to play. Clearly Blizzard instead opted for the ‘PC-AT sitting behind Grandma’s couch, connected by serial cable to her ISDN modem’ approach. Now their game has been hacked and they’re lying about it (by pretending the problem isn’t on their end even though it obviously is) and telling people to use this ‘authenticator’ thing that doesn’t even help (because the problem is on their end.)
There’s a doomsday clock somewhere in my head and when it hits midnight I’m not playing PC games (or console games, since apparently the same bullshit is starting to happen with them too) other than eroges any more. It just ticked over three seconds.
Somehow I’m not surprised, I was hacked by the chinese twice so I got I deactivated my acct on wow. And just simply ignored wow from now on.
Thank goodness that I don’t like diablo series at all.
And.
"Be aware that there are restrictions on the number of rollbacks available - it seems to be two based on answers to submitted tickets - and that being hacked more than once will cause your account to be banned permanently from using the soon-to-be-released real money auction house. "
Great. Now that customer have less than complete product xD
Once you’ve spent real money on the license to play a game only sometimes, providing everything on their end is working, you’ve already bought something much less than a complete product. This would just cripple it further =P
I was willing to cut them some slack; I am basically 100% opposed to online-only requirements for single-player games. But they actually offered up a good reason to make saves only be in the cloud - a real-money auction house, rampant duping issues in Diablo 2. Okay, fine. I can get on board with requiring saves be stored remotely in order to prevent people from hacking the game for epic loot.
And then they fuck it up like this. They just can’t win …
Blizzard has given an official response on the issue.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/ … age=29#571
That’s right customers: It’s your all your fault… less QQ more pewpew.
Tom’s Hardware gives their own summary here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Diablo … 15724.html
The forum flame wars (those who believe Blizzard; those who do not) are epic.
Blizzard is in damage control, because the media is now starting to pick up on the hacking reports:
Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/20 … ld-stolen/
International Business Times:
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/343461/ … uction.htm
Blizzard has also been systematically locking and deleting forum threads about the hacking.
Heh… makes the Mass Effect 3 ending fiasco look tame. 
Blizzard basically got too greedy imo.
By Advocating a RMT AH they basically encourage this type of behavior. I would have gotten the game if it were single player offline or had been able to set up a private server and play with a few friends. (Actually did this a few times with Diablo 2 just called my friend and gave him the ip address of my private game.) No Blizzard wants Cloud Saves and online all the time I’m playing. Thanks but no thanks.
From the Mass Effect 3 fiasco to this thing with Diablo 3, I’m suddenly reminded why I mainly stuck with games from Japan and why I prefer consoles.
There is a flip side to that argument. RMT is already happening anyway. It will continue to happen no matter how hard Blizzard tries to crack down on it. It’s about as effective as Prohibition. By legitimizing it, they can get control of it, and providing legit channels should - in theory anyway! - cut down on fraud. I mean, look at the crazy shit people do to cheat at achievements on XBox Live. You have to pay the guy, then tell him your password so he can login as you. Unsurprisingly, tons of people find out the hard way that this is a REALLY bad idea when their account gets hijacked.
Philosophically speaking, most game companies don’t care about RMT. If people are doing RMT, that means people are paying a subscription to play it. It also means that people have so much disposable income, they’d be willing to buy franchise merchandise (like t-shirts, figurines, novels, and whatnot).
The reason why game companies resist RMT, is because they don’t want to be held legally or financially responsible for anything bad that happens. If game companies did nothing to stop RMT, then they could be accused of aiding and abetting when someone got fraud. By openly saying they oppose it and doing a weekly sweep of two or three gold farmers, it keeps away lawyers and players with too much sense of entitlement for virtual wealth. The RMT refusal is their automatic win in court for that sort of stuff (i.e. “we told you not to do it”).
Blizzard doing the RMT AH is a major shift in the traditional policy… and it will open a HUGE amount of doors for potential lawsuits. Other companies are watching closely, and seeing if Blizzard fails or succeeds with this. Then they’ll either copy it, or stay far away from the idea.
The most obvious way in which this is a legal landmine is in the ownership of virtual property thing. Typically game companies prefer the narrative that in-game objects aren’t real, aren’t worth anything and you don’t need to be compensated if they are lost due to the company’s actions. We’ll see how long that lasts when said company encourages users to trade these in-game objects for money with other players (sure, these objects have no value, which is why we made it possible to trade these valueless objects for actual money, not that we expect anyone to actually DO it!) I suspect the courts won’t buy it no matter what you have to agree to when you play Diablo III.
PCs is far superior to consoles, there’s no question. The moddability is great.
Compared to how terrible modding is for consoles. Tina blond? You don’t like her being blond so you change her to a red head and then Sony sues you for bazillion dollars cuz they don’t like your mod. They can sod off.
Oh and I play both consoles and pcs. although I think consoles is headed for extinction sooner or later in the current environment and company’s attitudes. I bought it, Its mine now, and If I don’t like the outfit you offered to me, I’m going to damn well change it to suit my tastes.
I don’t think much of consoles myself. The whole ‘manufacturer gatekeeper’ thing consoles have going is incredibly old fashioned and it defies belief customers are still finding it acceptable in 2012. We wouldn’t let Dell or Compaq or whoever tell us what we can and can’t run on our PCs, but we allow this sort of thing from Microsoft, Sony etc? Unbelievable.
It’s also the reason we don’t get eroges in their original form on consoles and hence the reason we don’t get most eroges at all. It’s pretty disgusting manufacturer moralising and I definitely wouldn’t buy a console if the manufacturer had the gall to tell me what I can and can’t use it for. Would you buy a washing machine if the manufacturer said you couldn’t use this model for coloureds, you had to buy another one with that functionality? Good lord no.
All it takes is good competition and it’ll break the dumbass rules consoles have going on. Right now, its pretty much just sony and microsoft playing together nicely to shaft the customers.
If i recall correctly, Dead or Alive gets pissy when you mod their characters. So the people they want dead went underground and modding away. It annoys me because it means I can’t get help easily. I want moar outfits. Not recolored version of 2 for four times.
Oh and Nintendo is dead, they lost their soul years ago.
I don’t see how that follows. Even if consoles allowed triple-X along with triple-A, we still wouldn’t get most eroge. The things keeping most eroge in Japan are varied but ultimately most of them boil down to money. Not enough people buy them. If you could sell a million copies of Kanon or Saya no Uta then the companies would be lining up to translate their games.
But you can’t. You can sell a few thousand. So they aren’t.
Who said anything about translation? Since when do you have to translate a game to port it to console? There’s lots of console games that aren’t translated. I’m not following the logic here at all.
EDIT: Mind, I should make clear I don’t actually WANT eroges on consoles, but that’s actually mostly because consoles are shitty (and part of the reason that is true is because they don’t allow eroge) - not that I mind providing that I get a PC version. But I’m still pissed off at not being able to play DUNAMIS15 without forking out for a PS3/XB360 I wouldn’t use for anything else (only other use for the PS3 is for watching BD-DVDs, which I don’t have and don’t plan to watch)