Diablo 3 breaks record for fastest selling PC game.Ever.

[Darkest]

Originally Posted by eclap

Seriously, if you were making a game, put a lot of money into it's development, would you not protect it with some sort of DRM? Oh no, you would rather have it pirated even before it's released and make a massive loss.

Make an assumed massive loss. I genuinely believe Blizzard would be selling copies of D3 simularly to how it is now without the always online feature. It isn't the "DRM" that's keeping people from pirating it, I assure you there's tens of thousands of people out there waiting for someone to circumvent the DRM so they can pirate it, they don't mind waiting and have no intention of paying to play it early. Not to mention the fact the guest passes and upcoming trial allow a great many to try before they buy without hitting torrent sites. Something I believe Blizzard is doing right.

The game sold well because it has a decade + legacy and is made by a company that commands a lot of respect from the community. Just like Skyrim sold well, and The Witcher 2 sold well. Not to this extent, obviously - but the point stands. People haven't been waiting ten years for a Witcher or TES game.

Not to mention your entire retort has no baring what-so-ever on anything I said. There's such a thing as taking the Blizzard apologist attitude too far. If I were to release a product I would do exactly what CD Projekt Red have taken to doing. I do not support any form of DRM and wont start supporting it by putting myself in the shoes of the fat cats that decide upon DRM policies to begin with. In the end they hurt nobody but the legitimate consumer. Single player games with latency issues a thing of the future? The fact people support this is ludicrous.

Originally Posted by rflair

Good for Blizzard.

The only people I see still complaining about the DRM do not even own the game.

That's a given considering many of those complaining don't want to support DRM in games. Of course they're not going to own the game. At the least many of them actually gave it the benefit of the doubt and gave a guest pass a go. Hell, some even bought it and regretted the purchase - there are a couple on this forum. The Blizzard forums are flooded by them, although I must admit that's not saying much as Blizzards forums are constantly full of people complaining.

[adrock311]

6.3 million people must agree that PC gaming is dead

[PhazeDelta1]

Thats just in the US. It's probably triple the amount sold in Korea. You know thos guys love their Blizzard games.

[Alex13]

Originally Posted by rflair

Good for Blizzard.

The only people I see still complaining about the DRM do not even own the game.

Im in a clan. ~4k registered members. We got x4 more activity than this forum section has ever seen. Trust me everyones unhappy with the drm. And everyones unhappy with the nerfs. Top two topics for the day

[rflair]

Originally Posted by Alex13

Im in a clan. ~4k registered members. We got x4 more activity than this forum section has ever seen. Trust me everyones unhappy with the drm. And everyones unhappy with the nerfs. Top two topics for the day

So your in a clan with 4000 members who obviously play online games, they are in clan after all and they are complaining they have to be online to play.

I could care less about the DRM, I like the game, I have an always on internet connection so why not use it.

[The Laughing Ma]

If you believe that was a secondary concern for Blizzard, you're dreaming. It's called always on DRM because that's exactly what it is - Blizzard could have included a single player with offline capability that was hardcoded to be seperate from the Multi.

I don't doubt they could have, I would even go as far as to say that they should have but the game as it is, with the ability to take your single player character straight in to multiplayer means that whatever the reason for the always online system, the justification that it is there to protect the integrity of the AH holds water.

[Alex13]

Some people are smart enough to care. And being forced to log on to a server that goes through random down phases to have access to a purely PVE aspect of the game is unacceptable. Anyway, casuals will be casuals. Good luck dieing on hell/inferno with those random lag spikes

[Redemption80]

I can see it from both sides myself, on one hand if all is good server wise, and its a good game then good on them, they have worked on it a long time so obviously alot of money was put into the game, so they need it to sell really well.

On the other hand though, it does send out a signal to other publishers/developers that if you want a successful PC game, then don't worry about wasting your time with high end visuals, or think DRM will lose you sales, as PC gamers are always online anyway.

I personally don't believe that the huge sales are anything to do with the lack of a cracked version, but more to do with it being a nice casual game that anyone with a laptop to a high end PC can get into, not to mention Activision's and their world conquering marketing, but it's going to be near impossible to argue piracy isn't killing PC gaming when something like this happens.

[Tat3]

Originally Posted by rflair

So your in a clan with 4000 members who obviously play online games, they are in clan after all and they are complaining they have to be online to play.

I could care less about the DRM, I like the game, I have an always on internet connection so why not use it.

You have internet connection always on, good for you. This system also needs Blizzard's servers to be online and not have a maintaince going on or other stuff. If this system actually had worked people would not have had lag spikes and there would be no complains about not being able to play because people are not able to log in or are disconnected from the game.

Check out review by Unitlost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMAr...&feature=g-u-u They had some good points.

[sykozis]

Originally Posted by Darkest

If you believe that was a secondary concern for Blizzard, you're dreaming. It's called always on DRM because that's exactly what it is - Blizzard could have included a single player with offline capability that was hardcoded to be seperate from the Multi.

Which would have gone against what the community wanted.....which was the ability to use the same character in both single and multi-player and have a real money auction house.

Originally Posted by Seketh

As long as I have a single lag spike on the Starter Edition playing singleplayer, I won't buy it.

Every online game has a chance at lag spikes.....unless the game didn't sell for **** compared to the projections. The servers for WoW were setup to handle a larger number of connections than they do....but players still experience occassional "lag spikes".....

[The Laughing Ma]

Some people are smart enough to care.

The issue though is the majority of folk that are complaining about it aren't being very smart at all. They are describing it in the same breath as the sort of thing that Ubisoft tried a year or so ago. The major difference here is that

a). The Ubisoft version existed purely as DRM it served literally no purpose beyond being DRM
b). It was wank, after all it failed to stop the pirates for even a week
c). It clearly had next to no where near the investment in the infrastructure that Blizzard have given to D3s setup. None of Ubi's games sold even half as much as D3 has yet they still suffered from day one server issues.

By all means complain about the system complain about it always being online even if you only play single player but for the love of god will people stop calling it DRM!

Just for the record, I just had to quit playing D3 because the lag spikes in game were getting beyond annoying. So yeah the always online part does piss me off.

[Darkest]

Originally Posted by sykozis

Which would have gone against what the community wanted.....which was the ability to use the same character in both single and multi-player and have a real money auction house.

I've always found this argument to be nonsensical, at least from Blizzards standpoint. I would love to see the collective emails and posts where people genuinely asked for this. Even if it was as wide spread as is claimed, I'm willing to bet that the majority of people asking for it would have decided against the idea had they known it would come in the form of an always online DRM.

The majority of people I knew that played D2 played it online, even when playing single player. They wanted to be able to use their single player characters online because when playing offline due to their net being down, battle.net having troubles, or simply not wanting to deal with potential lag, their progress was of no worth to their community efforts. Forcing people to always play online didn't fix that, it just stopped people from being able to play a single player game offline.

Originally Posted by The Laughing Ma

I don't doubt they could have, I would even go as far as to say that they should have but the game as it is, with the ability to take your single player character straight in to multiplayer means that whatever the reason for the always online system, the justification that it is there to protect the integrity of the AH holds water.

I agree that the justification is there, but it comes across to me as more of an excuse to have implemented an always online system and offer no form of offline play what-so-ever. As I mentioned earlier, most D2 players played on battle.net even when they were playing single. The desire for single player characters to be usable online (outside of a LAN, at least) was down to people wanting to avoid the issues of playing online and still have their progress count. It feels like a cop out by Blizzard to me.

[airbud7]

Pentium 4/7800 GT=100fps...Legendary...

[DrD0ctor]

Originally Posted by eclap

Seriously, if you were making a game, put a lot of money into it's development, would you not protect it with some sort of DRM? Oh no, you would rather have it pirated even before it's released and make a massive loss.

You honestly believe this game wouldn't sell millions without the DRM? Please, instead of 6.3 million it'd sell 6 million, big deal.

[Redemption80]

I'm still not convinced it's not just DRM, it reeks of it, but they just went one step further than Ubisoft, while also spending more money on the marketing department who would convince people it wasn't DRM.

TBH, i'm biased, i don't like games like this as i consider them to just be the boy version of The Sims, so i would never of bought this game anyway, especially at the rip off price, but i do worry that the success of this game will be the death of single player games as we know them, especially on the PC.

[AbjectBlitz]

Good news for Blizzard, I just hope this does not mean more developers try emulate these type of games (SC,WoW,Diablo) as none of these are what made me love PC gaming in the 90's. Not my cup of tea at all.

[sykozis]

Ummmm.... Other devs have tried to copy them.... Trion Worlds tried to copy WoW with Rift (and have failed miserably). EA tried to copy WoW with SW:TOR and have lost 400K players in the last month or so (down to 1.3M vs 1.7M peak). Dev studios seem to think if they can copy what sells, they'll have the same success.....but unlike most dev studios, Blizzard is well known for quality products. Sure, they may have server issues initially, but how many games (that use servers) don't have issues at launch?

[shoja]

Good for Blizzard.

[isidore]

I see a lot of post about lag. I have to say i had only two problems with this game, got disconnected from the server 2 times, that's all. Had lag only the first minute when i enter the game (which is acceptable). The online only acts as both drm and online community. Blizzard thought of both. I don't agree with the fact that i'm forced to stay online to play MY single player payed game, but the game is great, addictive and it will get even better.

Also i'm glad it sold so good, and it will keep on selling, this game should show every little bastard from Ubi with their ****ty games that PC gamers do buy games but only games that deserve buying.

[Redemption80]

It took abit longer, but PC gamers bought just as many copies of The Sims3 as well.

How come when another game published by Activision that uses dated visuals and also has a huge marketing scheme sells well, it’s because people are sheep and just buy things because it’s popular, but with this, it’s because it’s a great game.

Not saying this is a bad game, but it’s had a huge amount of money pushing people to buy it, half the time it’s hard to find a PC game in a shop, but with this it’s splattered all over the place, even supermarkets had huge cardboard cut outs as you walked through their doors.

Every console only gamer I know also bought this, as they can run it on their laptop, when it comes to say a game like Max Payne 3 they will buy it on either the 360/PS3, so it’s not hard to see why a game like this sells more than other PC games, being a good/bad game has very little to do with it.

[eclap]

Originally Posted by Alex13

Some people are smart enough to care. And being forced to log on to a server that goes through random down phases to have access to a purely PVE aspect of the game is unacceptable. Anyway, casuals will be casuals. Good luck dieing on hell/inferno with those random lag spikes

I only die because the game is really hard at times, died through lag maybe once or twice. And no matter what anyone says, had the game been pirated it would not have sold so many copies. Fact.

[eclap]

Originally Posted by DrD0ctor

You honestly believe this game wouldn't sell millions without the DRM? Please, instead of 6.3 million it'd sell 6 million, big deal.

No it would more likely sell less than that. And even 300k copies is 15 million usd so why loose out on that? Do you think they make games for fun? Or money?

[eclap]

Originally Posted by airbud7

Pentium 4/7800 GT=100fps...Legendary...

Erm, no...

[Darren Hodgson]

Originally Posted by isidore

I see a lot of post about lag. I have to say i had only two problems with this game, got disconnected from the server 2 times, that's all. Had lag only the first minute when i enter the game (which is acceptable). The online only acts as both drm and online community. Blizzard thought of both. I don't agree with the fact that i'm forced to stay online to play MY single player payed game, but the game is great, addictive and it will get even better.

Lag is a persistent issue for me despite having a solid 24 Mbps connection (actually 10 Mbps due to the distance from the exchange). I'm not sharing it with anyone else in the house either. Every game I've resumed from has suffered from severe lag for the first minute or two, which brings the framerate down as low as 15 fps, and then it stabilises afterwards. However, even then I still see my character suddenly jumping from one spot to another, I still get intermittent split second freezes and every now and again the controls don't respond in time. Plus movement is not smooth but seems to judder, causing a split-second double-image around NPCs and scenery (it's hard to explain).

This would be acceptable if I was playing co-op but I'm not, I've only been playing solo on a machine that should be capable of running this game with ease (in fact, when it behaves it can as I get framerates no lower than 90 fps with v-sync off, even during heavy combat). The lag is actually tainting my enjoyment of the game and there's nothing I can do about it.

[eclap]

I've not seen a fps drop like that yet. My lowest was around 60fps.