- In order to defend themselves from the hordes of mods, bots, and Joey Greco impersonators, the entire game will be online only, requiring a constant internet connection to battle.net's all-seeing eye. To put it another way, kiss your single player offline life goodbye.
- Branching off from that, all mods, sinister or not, are totally forbidden.
- Perhaps most "surprising" (surprising as in "wow didn't think they'd have the balls to do it") part was their announcement that rather than allow third parties to totally wreck the game economy by selling uniques/runes/charms for real cash, now we have an auction house that may wreck the game economy by letting you sell uniques/runes/charms for real cash (articles have mentioned that game gold can also be used, but I cannot believe that gold in any Diablo game will ever have relevancy)
As you might expect from my general attitude to all things new and scary, I'm not really a fan of this.
The internet-only thing is the part that least affects me, personally. I'm a middle-class white American, a strong wireless cable connection is my god-given right. I honestly also spent most of my Diablo II life on the ladder, saving up runes and shitty uniques to eventually give my lineage of summon necros Enigma runewords so my murder capabilities would be tripled, so it's not like I have any personal stake in offline single player remaining.
But hey not everyone that played and loved Diablo II was a middle-class white American. Stable internet connections aren't a guaranteed infrastructure even in America (or rather especially in America), to say nothing of stable non-dialup internet connections. I'm not claiming to be some social crusader with an idyllic picture of starving African children running across their village to watch some family beating Nightmare Andariel for the first time, but it still seems fairly shitty to be punishing people for bad internet, especially when the reasoning for it is pretty shitty.
Diablo II's current online life is essentially gore-drenched hammerdin bots and endless advertisement bots. It's not a fun place, and if placing all these restrictions on play style removes this specter or severely reduces it, I'll probably drop my WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN act and be sort of happy. But it takes alot of credulous belief in Blizzard's coding, not to mention an unwillingness to face the reality of hacking in WoW, to believe that within three months of release neither the Chinese or Russians are going to figure out a workaround. And then we'll be right back to Blizzard playing the reactive houseowner cutting Marmaduke in half with the Grandfather, only for the pieces to regenerate and tell me that I'll get a free Stone of Jordan with a purchase of $10.99 or more. And with that, the only direct result of this will be people like me fearing an account ban because I dared to join a private server for a content mod that balances the game once Blizzard gets sleepy and just goes "uh buff corpse explosion see you in six months zzzz."
I won't lie, of all of this, it's the lack of mods that bothers me the most out of anything. Continuing to play the original Diablo II a couple of times after beating it has no real challenge unless you do silly challenges or enjoy being a dickpunched hero and go Hardcore. Mods that entirely rewrote the game, like Midnight Sun or MedianXL actually made it fun to experiment again and recreate being sixteen and having no idea how to get past a certain monster. But I'm sure Blizzard will accommodate me and release lots of DLC with NEW SKILLS and TERRIFYING NEW MONSTERS, right?
Now we come to the part that's really enraged those nerds: The Auction House. For all intents, Blizzard has legitimized the practices of getting banned from WoW dungeons because your gearscore is not high enough, or getting splattered by Timmy's hammerdin in PVP because he's spent a hundred dollars on an inventory's worth of 40/15 ias jewels. The eras of cute micro-transactions for cosmetic shit only is over, now those with the disposable income or welfare checks can bypass the grinding experience with Blizzard's blessings.
In a depressing way, this is probably the best thing for Blizzard to do. If Timmy is going to steal his mother's credit card and pay for his advantages, it's probably better to do so over Blizzard's encrypted channels than something operated by an offshoot of the Russian mafia. Blizzard is, if nothing else, a company with perfect business sense, and just tapped an income source that was going entirely to benefit fairly scummy people. Of course, the reality is that all that's really changed is that now the scummy people are going to have to pay Blizzard a percentage of the profits to operate. Accounts are still going to get hacked, dupes will inevitably be summoned, poor people are going to be given armor with 250% MF and told to kill a certain boss X numbers of times in a twelve hour period or have their already poverty-level wages docked. I have to respect the Blizzard PR drones that are going to be emphasizing in the months up to the release that this is all to totally curtail hackers and for the benefits of you, the consumer!!! ^_______^
In conclusion, this is all kind of pointless bitching. Diablo III is going to be disgustingly successful financially, we're all going to buy/pirate it, and people that refuse micro-transactions will just play on their private passworded game or the equivalent thereof, occasionally venturing out to a trade channel to dump their wares for slightly better gear. The sum result of this is that the average gamer gets a slightly lamer game, Blizzard gets significantly more money, and the exploitation that always occurs when sweet lewt, dumb gamers, and intelligent criminals intersect will only increase.
Oh ho ho. Yeah Yeah.
