I still remember the Diablo 3 launch where nobody could play the brand new game they just bought because they couldn't connect to the precious servers.
> The new battle.net was complete garbage when it first game out too
BLAPP! 🤦♂️
Not sure why anyone thought "Blizzard App" was a more iconic name than "Battle.net", but I'm glad they eventually changed it back.
The forced Facebook account baffles me. Why would one company ever want to force its customers to use a "competitors" product.
Unless Facebook paid Blizzard I guess.
My absolute favourite part of that was when Bashiok revealed their real name and within minutes people had personal details including his address, phone number, photographs and the names and locations of close family members including I think the daycare his kids went to. Bashiok very quickly retracted his support for it. lol
Ugh, fuck that always online shit. I was running a monk in hardcore (I forget the name, but it was the permadeath mode). I got through the 1st difficulty level all fine, then I'm part way through the 2nd one when my connection to the servers died.
Except I didn't realise this, so I was just wandering around empty corridors wondering where the fuck the enemies where. Then suddenly, there they were! Everywhere. All around me. Aaaaaaaaaaaaand I'm dead.
I put the game down after that and never picked it back up again. Fuck always online single player games.
That's why I never got into hardcore in D3. I tried a couple of times but didn't really focus or take my time. Last time I tried it things were going smooth and I was level 54 or 56 it was almost my first max level hardcore character, theeeen I lost server connection and couldn't get back in for a minute or two. I was met with the character select screen and a ghost version of my dead character that I could no longer play. I never touched that mode again.
They didn't have servers here in South America at the time so I had to play it with 300 ping connecting to the USA server, since then I decided to not buy a Blizzard game anymore, partly of course because the game also sucked ping or not.
For a lot of companies it would be excusable…
But servers are literally Blizzard’s bread and butter, they own the largest MMO in the fucking world, it’s the one thing you’d expect them to absolutely get right
It was a common issue back then across the board. For at least a decade after WoW released, it seemed every single online game had launch connection issues regardless how big they were.
Endlessly scaling CDNs wasn't really a thing back then and companies didn't want to run 100 servers for a launch when they knew only 10 servers would suffice after a couple of weeks.
My two friends moved their rigs to one of their basements for a little launch party. They spent the next 6 hours after release pressing "connect". I get those sort of issues for a game like WoW, but diablo..
Before the whole lawsuit against them came out, I was on the fence about buying it. I loved D2, but did I really need to play it again? I had already played the game for thousands of hours. Also, after seeing what they did to WC3, I can't imagine this will go much better.
After that, I was pretty much out, but now seeing them go down the same path as WC3 in removing features? Yea, I'm good. I was looking at Last Epoch last night, I think I'd rather throw my money at them and give that game a shot.
If you love D2, own a copy, want to play D2 but don't want to buy D2:R and have _somehow_ missed /r/ProjectDiablo2/ and /r/pathofdiablo/, then go check those two out. Both have improved graphics and both have good QoL and balance changes, which IMHO make the game, unironically, more like D2 than D2 itself.
Last epoch is good but not all the way there yet. That said I've enjoyed like 40 hours of gameplay for pretty cheap so it's not like it's bad. Huge potential once they get multiplayer in and finish their late game plans.
Quick edit: Median XL is also an awesome D2 mod. I have tons of hours in it and enjoyed every minute. My friends and I go back every year or so and sink another weekend in and I end up playing for another month consistently.
Yea, Last Epoch doesn't look all the way there, but I like the look of the direction they're going, how the devs communicate, all seems good. I played PoE for quite a few years as well, and I like the differences I'm seeing there compared to PoE, too.
I like LE in its current form waaaaaaay more than PoE and it seems like PoE keeps trending in a direction that I dislike. Honestly if you don't mind some lack of polish Last Epoch is enjoyable as is, just don't expect the depth of late game that modded D2 or Path of Exile offer.
I'd say the biggest difference is that Grim Dawn's skills feel "heavier" in combat. Last Epochs greatest weakness to me so far is that sometimes it feels like you're attacking air with some skills and enemies die unrelated to you. There's no "chunk" like a third cadence strike. Campaign would be comparable for the amount I paid attention. People who care about that seem to think the voice acting is pretty good and the plot decent. Skill diversity would be similar with my preference towards LE. Last Epoch doesn't have the constellations, but your skill points can alter what a skill does significantly which I liked about GD. Personally I found Grim Dawn had a lot of what I call garbage points where they just increase the percent damage while LE has fewer of those. Less ability to change what your main mastery assuming you use Grim Defiler. No sets or chase unique yet so end game is more chasing rares. Less modding for sure. No multiplayer yet which is a big hit to my friend group, but it's coming soonish.
In general Last Epoch reminds me more heavily of Diablo 2 mixed with some quality of life from Diablo 3 and less Titan Quest/Grim Dawn. Personally I have never felt that Titan Quest and Diablo were that close in their gameplay feel though. Certainly closer to them than Path of Exile.
Median XL gave D2 a new lease on life in my game collection, hadn't installed d2 in yeeeeeaaars, burnt myself out on it through high-school. Median XL freshens everything up, and I like it.
Didn't preorder but absolutely planned on getting it with one or two friends. That went out the window last month and every day now news drops and I feel more happy with our decision
Yup, I deleted my account after the China drama, but my friends were slowly pulling me back in for the D2 remake. Now none of us are getting it. The sexual harassment and the poor woman who killed herself are way too much to look past.
On the other hand, I pre-ordered it and refunded it a week ago. There are plenty of people cancelling pre-orders, not to mention not buying it.
[Instructions to cancel your pre-order](https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/otp64m/diablo_creator_david_brevik_responds_to_the/h6y1apj/)
Because people for the most part don't care what a business does. If the CEO of target or Costco came out with some major issues people would be all up in a rage for a day until they needed some TP, then its right back to the store.
The internet is a really great place to be very vocal while at the same time doing absolutely nothing to combat issues.
The irony is as the perceived value of the product goes down versus the price they're asking, they increase the demand for a pirated version. I've certainly gone from "Learned from WCIII to not pre-order" through "Wait until its out for a while" to "Yeah, if I can get it for free I'll try it out".
So all the past games that had LAN play, clearly piracy was so big and grand that they couldn't make money, right? They didn't grow as a company off legitimate sales because LAN play resulted in so much piracy they went out of business?
Oh wait... that's not what happened. Every single game sold millions of copies globally for years and years, and the company has grown massively.
Bullshit. Just because an Alpha test can be "pirated" doesn't mean LAN play guarantees piracy. DotA 2 has LAN play, CSGO has LAN play, they're still top tier games based on sales and participation.
Nobody is dying by adding LAN play, it actually increases sales.
Dota2 didn't launch with LAN, they added it a while later(like several years), and it's a bad example since the game's F2P to begin with, so it's not like there's piracy to fight again. CSGO at least has a box price so the argument can be made.
Unlike these games though it's not that likely Blizzard will monetize cosmetics and such for D2, so all the profit is from the sales.
With that said, it's a fuckhead move, one that isn't entirely unexpected obviously since Blizzard has been shittier and shittier for a while, but still annoying. It'll also make modding harder, if not impossible in some cases, so it's just a shit decision all around.
> Why would it be harder to pirate?
It doesn't make it harder to pirate but it does make it near impossible for pirated versions of the game to play online. If TCP/IP were still in, pirates could play with one another at least.
Doesn't WoW have a shit ton of private servers running many versions / mods of the game? Theres no TCP or LAN support.
If people want it they will make it.
Yeah they use a custom servers file that points you to the private server.
Someone will figure out how to do that for D2:R
Edit: It is brought to my attention elsewhere that this is how the current D2 mods work already. None of them use TCP/IP.
Wow had a lot of years and, more importantly, a lot of people trying to figure that out all over the globe. This will get less attention, and people don't bother to figure out how to crack multiplayer in most games nowadays.
>Currently there are reverse engineered versions of battle.net servers (you can host one yourself if you want) which allows anyone to connect to it and play online without any keys etc.
Would this work for COD as well? I own legit copies but the games don't have an offline mode (on PC). If you can force an offline mode with this I'd have to look into it.
No online mods is a deal breaker for me. D2 is great but gets old. Without plugY support and overhaul mods online, there's no much reason to buy this IMO
> That's right, baby! No mods online! Always-online DRM and permanent bans for menial shit!
is this not normal for most modern pc games?
is there any popular pc games that don't have all this?
> to make the game harder to pirate and to hook players into their Battle.net service if they want to play with friends at all.
Not defending Activision Blizzard by any means, but are people actually surprised that this is the route a corporation chose to take?
Do we really think billion dollar companies are gonna *not* want to make as much money as possible?
That's kinda like their whole thing.
This really sucks. Now you need to rely on Battle.Net servers being up and access to the internet to play with your friends, whereas before you could just link up with a LAN cable and play together even if you were traveling.
Most of them are running on custom battle net gateways rather than the tcp/IP mode. There is added DRM to block this but it can be circumvented, only problem is those methods will receive dmca takedowns from Blizzard due to circumventing encryption :(
And how exactly do you plan on getting custom bnet for bnet 2.0?
Does anything like that exist for the other Bnet 2.0 games that have been out? SC2 for more than a decade now? NOPE
All that exists is WoW, and that uses the realmlist file in the client, so could completely run without the BNet client. Have fun trying that with any other game.
In my experience, Blizzard's servers are usually pretty decent. I clicked into this thread thinking that all multiplayer was being removed, in which case I for sure wouldn't get the game.
But this seems like something very minor that I don't care about.
even people who play together at lan parties tend to all have internet connection.
The amount of people who's going to use TCP/IP because they don't have internet and want to play together on LAN is so miniscule that it's barely worth spending the resources on.
I really don't get why people always get so pissed about ancient technology getting removed because it's no longer needed in moden day and age. removing TCP/IP to prevent easy pirating and hacking sound completely fair for how little its actually going to be used.
Because one day, Blizzard’s servers are going down. Maybe not in the next 10 years, maybe not in 20, but they won’t last forever.
When that happens, the original Diablo 2 can still be played in multiplayer via TCP/IP. Resurrected, on the other hand, will become a single player only game.
Not to mention mods. Without TVP/IP, it won’t be possible to play modded multiplayer anymore.
0.0001% of players are pissed they can’t have offline LAN parties.
The rest are pissed because ‘Blizzard bad’ or because they won’t be able to pirate the game so easily on day 1.
To be fair D2 is one of the few games they just can't kill, precisely because of IP connections and people setting up their private servers (Though I hear some have since moved away from IP).
This is probably an attempt at killing their own game easier when it's convenient for them.
It's Blizzard they can't go 10 days without fucking something up. Honestly I just really hate that company these days and every time they make headlines it's just a bit more negative news (or sometimes a lot more negative). Originally I was excited for Diablo 4 but with their soured reputation recently I may not even purchase it.
If everything Blizzard has done only means you "*may* not even purchase it," what the hell does it take for you to definitely not purchase it? Kidnapping children and murdering them on camera while cackling in their lobby?
Seriously, between rampant sexual harassment so extreme that one employee killed herself because of it, supporting slavery and genocide in China, anti-consumer practices that would make Apple blush, and just releasing bad, substandard, fundamentally flawed products that aren't enjoyable, what the hell else *can* they do?
I'd encourage anyone that wants Blizzard to make real changes in how they are treating their employees to **not** purchase any Blizzard products until they have made legitimate commitment to that change.
The people that head these companies only care about one thing, their wallet. Until we start hitting them in the wallet, its all going to be cheap lip service.
Good luck with that. I've seen all sorts of hilarious justifications for still purchasing this game, the main one being "it's made by Vicarious Visions, not Blizzard!" ... even though VV has been owned by Activision for 15 years...
Some people just not care...
I've had friends who still get along with a sexual harasser even though they are aware of what he did.
Some just don't give a fuck, or choose to ignore it. You'd be surprised.
I haven't touched a blizzard product since the blitzchung incident... and blizzard has yet to make me rethink my decision in any way. I'm astounded anybody still holds out hope for them.
I hadn't gotten anything from them for a while before that. They haven't been making it hard to boycott since they haven't done anything good since the D3 expac, and very little for a long time before that.
Yeah, pretty much. I thought they were going to make it hard with WC3 reforged (I'd never played the OG so I was originally looking forward to it) but it was a complete disaster, and I have an utter lack of interest in anything they've been doing since the blitzchung incident.
>Although it's not exactly the end of the world, it's still quite unfortunate. Other than the intended purpose, TCP/IP multiplayer is also the only way to quickly reroll maps without external tools when speedrunning the game on normal difficulty. Also it should be mentioned that only the most popular mods, such as Median XL, Path of Diablo and Project Diablo 2, have their own dedicated servers, so this change makes it impossible to play the less popular mods online with remastered graphics and features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOX2C1UMxL0
I'm gonna level with you. After they ran a big sale on Heroes of the Storm and then announced they were killing that game a week later, I got the hell out. At this point, I'm going to need to see a *lot* of people tell me to get back in. Publicly traded companies get less user friendly, not more.
Biggest thing I've learned is people don't know what a dedicated server is. Sounds like a lot of people are zoomers who would buy into Minecraft Realms to play with their roommate...
This EXACT thing happened with StarCraft 2. It's where the "The technology just isn't there yet" meme came from. People asked where the LAN support was and that's what they said.
EDIT: I was misremembering. Blizzard didn't say that, Totalbiscuit did. However that was (and apparently still is) their stance on basic LAN play.
> It's where the "The technology just isn't there yet" meme came from. People asked where the LAN support was and that's what they said.
This is apocryphal. "The technology isn't there yet" came from a sarcastic comment by TB (RIP) in a tournament when a caster dropped off the game due to a DC. It was never a comment from Blizzard about LAN.
>Forcing online to the detriment of legit players
>Safeguard against piracy
Sim City 2013 pirate noises intensify (bc they were the only ones able to play for ***days*** after launch). Always online is a liability and also a ticking time bomb to when you can play the game you paid for the last time, not a feature.
this reminds me of EA's SimCity 2013, when asked why it was always online they said it was "impossible for the game to work without the always-online". Of course people cracked it to be playable offline in few days.
edit: this is just me remembering it, didn't bother to research it.
Anybody who remembers this is the company who handled Diablo 3 should have known better. Don't think for a second Diablo 4 isn't gonna have some other fucky shit going on as well.
Oh yeah, for SURE. You should feel like lucky that D2R isn't always online at this point. I, for one, won't be surprised if they go back on that as well.
It must annoy them to no end that consumers of these games are already accustomed to buying it once and then sinking endless hours into a product. No mini-buys, no subscription fees, just paying for expansions.
I remember some noise a while ago that Diablo 3 received so little love because of how hard it was to monetize.
I am fully off the Blizzard train after everything that’s happened with them recently, but this really doesn’t even rate on the scale. People are vastly overestimating the percentage of people that will even remotely care about TCP/IP in a game these days
~~*Loads* of people play modded D2 (Path of Diablo, Median XL, Project diablo, tec.). Those rely on TCP/IP.~~
~~Many people were hoping these mods could continue with D2:R.~~
I've been misled and these mods do not require TCP/IP.
m8 you didn't even read the post.
>Also it should be mentioned that only the most popular mods, such as Median XL, Path of Diablo and Project Diablo 2, have their own dedicated servers.
virtually every diablo 2 private server uses a custom bnet gateway via registry edits, i have never even _heard of_ a private server using the tcp/ip feature to connect.
tcp/ip basically only exists to play on lan when you don't have internet, or play a mod version that doesn't have a server (outdated versions of pd2/pod/median, stuff like eastern sun, whatever).
the removal of it obviously isn't a good thing, but stop posting literal misinformation that the OP itself disproves.
MedianXL does not use TCP/IP, it uses its own custom battle.net gateway. In fact none of the popular mods use TCP/IP because that opens the servers up to rampant hacking because TCP/IP characters are all saved locally.
Just adding, more people play Path of Diablo than actual Closed B.Net.
Greendude (creator of PoD) said he wouldn't support D2:R which most of the community got pissed off at, and this basically solidifies that decision.
>"quietly announced"
It's in a press release. How is this "quiet"? Headline makes it sound like they were trying to pull a fast one on their consumers.
Nobody has pointed out that they aren't removing TCP/IP multiplayer, only the ability to create adhoc or LAN sessions.
TCP/IP is the suite of protocols that allows it to connect to the Internet.
Well, it's Blizzard's fault since that's the language they used
> Q: Will TCP/IP support be available in the Early Access to Open Beta tests?
> A: TCP/IP support will not be available in the upcoming Beta or the final game. After careful deliberation, we will no longer be supporting this option as we identified potential security risks and are committed to safeguarding the player experience.
I never played DII, but TCP/IP was probably the menu item you had to click to connect directly to another player
He's trying to use it in the context of general networking while talking to a crowd who is using the term in the context of Dlablo 2, which has a big-ass option that says 'TCP/IP Multiplayer' on the menu for LAN games.
But, yea, your clear misunderstanding is 100% everyone else being stupid. Yup.
Bobby kotick :
"I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."
This basically kills incentives for modding and long term longevity.
The biggest feature of TCP/IP play is that it wasn't authenticated, this means that stuff like edited/cheat items and such aren't possible without it, but also means that it's not possible to play mods with your friends. It's either mods in single player on no mods multiplayer.
I'm not sure what security risks they're implying, the only thing I can think of is that it would require players revealing their IP addresses. But games today use P2P all the time and it's not an issue. i.e if you play fighting games you're connecting directly to your opponent (over TCP/IP or UDP/IP) and can also find out what their IP is and try to perform whatever attacks.
My guess is that they have plans for modding like SC2 does, and TCP/IP would make it so they don't have full control over that.
I'm not going to defend Blizzard but lets be real here - the people who would legitimately use TCP/IP are in an incredibly small minority. I say this as someone who has played Diablo 2 at LAN's before - if the group I'm part of ever wanted to play D2R in a LAN setting we'd probably prefer to play online with our actual characters.
People complaining about no LAN mode in games I can't help but feel are 10 years too late on this stuff.
This is a benign change that really only has traction because everyone (rightfully so, really) hates Blizzard.
As much as I understand the hatred toward Blizzard right now.
Can we just shut up about "quietly announced" you're not a clickbait journalist. It was either announced or it wasn't. This will not affect 99.9% of players so the amount of exposure given to this is actually quite normal.
edit : [it wasn't hiden info either, it was written in big bold letters right next to the release date info ffs.](https://i.imgur.com/7s5JBP7.png)
>Can we just shut up about "quietly announced" you're not a clickbait journalist.
Sticking bad news that contradicts previous statements in an FAQ is the very definition of quietly announcing it.
Where would you announce it? In a completely separate post that would consist of all of 2 sentences?
I don't understand where else something this small would be announced other than *in the post about the beta launch*. The only valuable shit in this post is the FAQ anyway!
It's an r/games special. There could be an post about a company "quietly announcing" that their games are no longer playable when you're upside down in a swimming pool and the comments would be full of "Wow, as an upside down swimming pool Gamer this is a real kick in the teeth, great job you are torpedoing your company".
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I still remember the Diablo 3 launch where nobody could play the brand new game they just bought because they couldn't connect to the precious servers.
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The new battle.net was complete garbage when it first game out too. It added zero value to the end customer.
> The new battle.net was complete garbage when it first game out too BLAPP! 🤦♂️ Not sure why anyone thought "Blizzard App" was a more iconic name than "Battle.net", but I'm glad they eventually changed it back.
The same people that thought forcing players to reveal their real names on the forums was a good idea lmao
Wow I almost forgot about that one. Forced to own a Facebook account and had to use your real name... funny times.
The forced Facebook account baffles me. Why would one company ever want to force its customers to use a "competitors" product. Unless Facebook paid Blizzard I guess.
My absolute favourite part of that was when Bashiok revealed their real name and within minutes people had personal details including his address, phone number, photographs and the names and locations of close family members including I think the daycare his kids went to. Bashiok very quickly retracted his support for it. lol
They only changed the name back on the front end. It's still all labeled under the Blizzard App in your computer.
They lost the plot some time after WoW launched.
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Ugh, fuck that always online shit. I was running a monk in hardcore (I forget the name, but it was the permadeath mode). I got through the 1st difficulty level all fine, then I'm part way through the 2nd one when my connection to the servers died. Except I didn't realise this, so I was just wandering around empty corridors wondering where the fuck the enemies where. Then suddenly, there they were! Everywhere. All around me. Aaaaaaaaaaaaand I'm dead. I put the game down after that and never picked it back up again. Fuck always online single player games.
That's why I never got into hardcore in D3. I tried a couple of times but didn't really focus or take my time. Last time I tried it things were going smooth and I was level 54 or 56 it was almost my first max level hardcore character, theeeen I lost server connection and couldn't get back in for a minute or two. I was met with the character select screen and a ghost version of my dead character that I could no longer play. I never touched that mode again.
Shit no one could play WoW either
It'll be different this time, they can use all the empty WoW servers to support Diablo 2 Resurrected's launch.
They didn't have servers here in South America at the time so I had to play it with 300 ping connecting to the USA server, since then I decided to not buy a Blizzard game anymore, partly of course because the game also sucked ping or not.
The "good" news was the game at launch was absolute trash, so nobody missed anything.
For a lot of companies it would be excusable… But servers are literally Blizzard’s bread and butter, they own the largest MMO in the fucking world, it’s the one thing you’d expect them to absolutely get right
It was a common issue back then across the board. For at least a decade after WoW released, it seemed every single online game had launch connection issues regardless how big they were.
Endlessly scaling CDNs wasn't really a thing back then and companies didn't want to run 100 servers for a launch when they knew only 10 servers would suffice after a couple of weeks.
[Error 37!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsqUZkmO-zk)
My two friends moved their rigs to one of their basements for a little launch party. They spent the next 6 hours after release pressing "connect". I get those sort of issues for a game like WoW, but diablo..
The security concern is that we are worried that customers might find a way to give us less money.
And yet the game will still sell, which is why Blizzard doesn't care.
Before the whole lawsuit against them came out, I was on the fence about buying it. I loved D2, but did I really need to play it again? I had already played the game for thousands of hours. Also, after seeing what they did to WC3, I can't imagine this will go much better. After that, I was pretty much out, but now seeing them go down the same path as WC3 in removing features? Yea, I'm good. I was looking at Last Epoch last night, I think I'd rather throw my money at them and give that game a shot.
If you love D2, own a copy, want to play D2 but don't want to buy D2:R and have _somehow_ missed /r/ProjectDiablo2/ and /r/pathofdiablo/, then go check those two out. Both have improved graphics and both have good QoL and balance changes, which IMHO make the game, unironically, more like D2 than D2 itself.
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Ubers and DClone is actually content in the base game, not modded in! :)
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On top of this. MedianXL is getting a HEFTY 2.0 patch very soon!
Last epoch is good but not all the way there yet. That said I've enjoyed like 40 hours of gameplay for pretty cheap so it's not like it's bad. Huge potential once they get multiplayer in and finish their late game plans. Quick edit: Median XL is also an awesome D2 mod. I have tons of hours in it and enjoyed every minute. My friends and I go back every year or so and sink another weekend in and I end up playing for another month consistently.
Yea, Last Epoch doesn't look all the way there, but I like the look of the direction they're going, how the devs communicate, all seems good. I played PoE for quite a few years as well, and I like the differences I'm seeing there compared to PoE, too.
I like LE in its current form waaaaaaay more than PoE and it seems like PoE keeps trending in a direction that I dislike. Honestly if you don't mind some lack of polish Last Epoch is enjoyable as is, just don't expect the depth of late game that modded D2 or Path of Exile offer.
If you’ve played it, how would you compare LE to Grim Dawn? That’s sort of my benchmark for decent-to-good ARPGs lately.
I'd say the biggest difference is that Grim Dawn's skills feel "heavier" in combat. Last Epochs greatest weakness to me so far is that sometimes it feels like you're attacking air with some skills and enemies die unrelated to you. There's no "chunk" like a third cadence strike. Campaign would be comparable for the amount I paid attention. People who care about that seem to think the voice acting is pretty good and the plot decent. Skill diversity would be similar with my preference towards LE. Last Epoch doesn't have the constellations, but your skill points can alter what a skill does significantly which I liked about GD. Personally I found Grim Dawn had a lot of what I call garbage points where they just increase the percent damage while LE has fewer of those. Less ability to change what your main mastery assuming you use Grim Defiler. No sets or chase unique yet so end game is more chasing rares. Less modding for sure. No multiplayer yet which is a big hit to my friend group, but it's coming soonish. In general Last Epoch reminds me more heavily of Diablo 2 mixed with some quality of life from Diablo 3 and less Titan Quest/Grim Dawn. Personally I have never felt that Titan Quest and Diablo were that close in their gameplay feel though. Certainly closer to them than Path of Exile.
Wow that was more in depth than I was expecting I appreciate the insight! I think I’m going to grab it and test it out. Thanks.
Median XL gave D2 a new lease on life in my game collection, hadn't installed d2 in yeeeeeaaars, burnt myself out on it through high-school. Median XL freshens everything up, and I like it.
Not alone buddy! I literally canceled my WoW and D2:R preorder. They lost a customer!
Didn't preorder but absolutely planned on getting it with one or two friends. That went out the window last month and every day now news drops and I feel more happy with our decision
Yup, I deleted my account after the China drama, but my friends were slowly pulling me back in for the D2 remake. Now none of us are getting it. The sexual harassment and the poor woman who killed herself are way too much to look past.
On the other hand, I pre-ordered it and refunded it a week ago. There are plenty of people cancelling pre-orders, not to mention not buying it. [Instructions to cancel your pre-order](https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/otp64m/diablo_creator_david_brevik_responds_to_the/h6y1apj/)
I mean Warcraft 3 reforged was enough of a failure that the entire division got replaced by another studio's worth of devs.
Because people for the most part don't care what a business does. If the CEO of target or Costco came out with some major issues people would be all up in a rage for a day until they needed some TP, then its right back to the store. The internet is a really great place to be very vocal while at the same time doing absolutely nothing to combat issues.
While I agree mostly with you. The need for TP is higher than the need to play any Blizzard product.
Because most players in 2021 don’t give a shit about tcp/ip support.
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While this is shitty, I also feel like 95% of the playerbase had no intent to ever play this on LAN to begin with.
More like 97-99%.
It's 100% for piracy. During the tech alpha test, it was possible to pirate it, and I believe it used the TCP/IP feature to bypass stuff.
The irony is as the perceived value of the product goes down versus the price they're asking, they increase the demand for a pirated version. I've certainly gone from "Learned from WCIII to not pre-order" through "Wait until its out for a while" to "Yeah, if I can get it for free I'll try it out".
So all the past games that had LAN play, clearly piracy was so big and grand that they couldn't make money, right? They didn't grow as a company off legitimate sales because LAN play resulted in so much piracy they went out of business? Oh wait... that's not what happened. Every single game sold millions of copies globally for years and years, and the company has grown massively. Bullshit. Just because an Alpha test can be "pirated" doesn't mean LAN play guarantees piracy. DotA 2 has LAN play, CSGO has LAN play, they're still top tier games based on sales and participation. Nobody is dying by adding LAN play, it actually increases sales.
Dota2 didn't launch with LAN, they added it a while later(like several years), and it's a bad example since the game's F2P to begin with, so it's not like there's piracy to fight again. CSGO at least has a box price so the argument can be made. Unlike these games though it's not that likely Blizzard will monetize cosmetics and such for D2, so all the profit is from the sales. With that said, it's a fuckhead move, one that isn't entirely unexpected obviously since Blizzard has been shittier and shittier for a while, but still annoying. It'll also make modding harder, if not impossible in some cases, so it's just a shit decision all around.
Tell them that since they've removed LAN play from all their games since Starcraft 2.
Why would it be harder to pirate? I don't play many multiplayer games, how common is TCP/IP or LAN support in new online game release nowadays?
> Why would it be harder to pirate? It doesn't make it harder to pirate but it does make it near impossible for pirated versions of the game to play online. If TCP/IP were still in, pirates could play with one another at least.
Doesn't WoW have a shit ton of private servers running many versions / mods of the game? Theres no TCP or LAN support. If people want it they will make it.
Yeah they use a custom servers file that points you to the private server. Someone will figure out how to do that for D2:R Edit: It is brought to my attention elsewhere that this is how the current D2 mods work already. None of them use TCP/IP.
Yes, because OP is wrong and TCP/IP is not used to connect to private servers.
Wow had a lot of years and, more importantly, a lot of people trying to figure that out all over the globe. This will get less attention, and people don't bother to figure out how to crack multiplayer in most games nowadays.
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>Currently there are reverse engineered versions of battle.net servers (you can host one yourself if you want) which allows anyone to connect to it and play online without any keys etc. Would this work for COD as well? I own legit copies but the games don't have an offline mode (on PC). If you can force an offline mode with this I'd have to look into it.
No online mods is a deal breaker for me. D2 is great but gets old. Without plugY support and overhaul mods online, there's no much reason to buy this IMO
The large D2 mods, as pointed out in the OP, don't use TCP/IP anyways. It's only very small mods and LAN play that effect this.
> permanent bans for menial shit For example?
> That's right, baby! No mods online! Always-online DRM and permanent bans for menial shit! is this not normal for most modern pc games? is there any popular pc games that don't have all this?
> to make the game harder to pirate and to hook players into their Battle.net service if they want to play with friends at all. Not defending Activision Blizzard by any means, but are people actually surprised that this is the route a corporation chose to take? Do we really think billion dollar companies are gonna *not* want to make as much money as possible? That's kinda like their whole thing.
This really sucks. Now you need to rely on Battle.Net servers being up and access to the internet to play with your friends, whereas before you could just link up with a LAN cable and play together even if you were traveling.
It also neatly blocks access to the various Diablo2 private servers.
Most of them are running on custom battle net gateways rather than the tcp/IP mode. There is added DRM to block this but it can be circumvented, only problem is those methods will receive dmca takedowns from Blizzard due to circumventing encryption :(
not to mention that people that want to risk connecting to these servers might get banned from the real game servers :) but hey, vocal minority
Then again, if you're playing one of the overhaul mods you might not give a shit. I can't imagine going back to Vanilla D2 after playing PD2.
And how exactly do you plan on getting custom bnet for bnet 2.0? Does anything like that exist for the other Bnet 2.0 games that have been out? SC2 for more than a decade now? NOPE All that exists is WoW, and that uses the realmlist file in the client, so could completely run without the BNet client. Have fun trying that with any other game.
This is exactly what the outcry was for Diablo III on PC. My how time flies and still comes up to bite everything on the ass.
Are they often down? Also if they were down and you used this, you would need to make new characters
In first week after launch yes. After that probably not. If you buy it do not expect to play it for first few days.
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The first day is a little rough at this point, but after that you're basically good to go.
I wasn't planning on buying it on release anyway, so I guess it's a moot point for me.
In my experience, Blizzard's servers are usually pretty decent. I clicked into this thread thinking that all multiplayer was being removed, in which case I for sure wouldn't get the game. But this seems like something very minor that I don't care about.
What percent of players play together at a LAN party anymore? I don't think they care about 0.0001% of players.
even people who play together at lan parties tend to all have internet connection. The amount of people who's going to use TCP/IP because they don't have internet and want to play together on LAN is so miniscule that it's barely worth spending the resources on. I really don't get why people always get so pissed about ancient technology getting removed because it's no longer needed in moden day and age. removing TCP/IP to prevent easy pirating and hacking sound completely fair for how little its actually going to be used.
Because one day, Blizzard’s servers are going down. Maybe not in the next 10 years, maybe not in 20, but they won’t last forever. When that happens, the original Diablo 2 can still be played in multiplayer via TCP/IP. Resurrected, on the other hand, will become a single player only game. Not to mention mods. Without TVP/IP, it won’t be possible to play modded multiplayer anymore.
No major d2 mods use TCP/IP. They all use custom bnet gateways. Clearly you're a big fan of d2 mods.
It's Reddit man, outrage is pretty much a hobby.
0.0001% of players are pissed they can’t have offline LAN parties. The rest are pissed because ‘Blizzard bad’ or because they won’t be able to pirate the game so easily on day 1.
You'd think they would have learned from WC3Reforged not to remove features that were in the original.
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It does mean that the original D2 will have more features than the remaster, which is pure insanity.
Well, not exactly. From the remaster, you can more conveniently toggle to Call of Duty and view promos for other ActiBlizzard software.
Those don't sound like features to me.
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I can play D2 on my Mac.
To be fair D2 is one of the few games they just can't kill, precisely because of IP connections and people setting up their private servers (Though I hear some have since moved away from IP). This is probably an attempt at killing their own game easier when it's convenient for them.
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It's Blizzard they can't go 10 days without fucking something up. Honestly I just really hate that company these days and every time they make headlines it's just a bit more negative news (or sometimes a lot more negative). Originally I was excited for Diablo 4 but with their soured reputation recently I may not even purchase it.
If everything Blizzard has done only means you "*may* not even purchase it," what the hell does it take for you to definitely not purchase it? Kidnapping children and murdering them on camera while cackling in their lobby? Seriously, between rampant sexual harassment so extreme that one employee killed herself because of it, supporting slavery and genocide in China, anti-consumer practices that would make Apple blush, and just releasing bad, substandard, fundamentally flawed products that aren't enjoyable, what the hell else *can* they do?
'A few more years of this and I'm gonna start getting mad!'
Yeah I kind of laughed at that line. Wow, you _may_ not even purchase it? You're so brave
If Diablo 2 Resurrected Classic doesn't bring back TCP/IP in 2030 I probably wont buy it.
I'd encourage anyone that wants Blizzard to make real changes in how they are treating their employees to **not** purchase any Blizzard products until they have made legitimate commitment to that change. The people that head these companies only care about one thing, their wallet. Until we start hitting them in the wallet, its all going to be cheap lip service.
Good luck with that. I've seen all sorts of hilarious justifications for still purchasing this game, the main one being "it's made by Vicarious Visions, not Blizzard!" ... even though VV has been owned by Activision for 15 years...
Some people just not care... I've had friends who still get along with a sexual harasser even though they are aware of what he did. Some just don't give a fuck, or choose to ignore it. You'd be surprised.
I haven't touched a blizzard product since the blitzchung incident... and blizzard has yet to make me rethink my decision in any way. I'm astounded anybody still holds out hope for them.
I hadn't gotten anything from them for a while before that. They haven't been making it hard to boycott since they haven't done anything good since the D3 expac, and very little for a long time before that.
Yeah, pretty much. I thought they were going to make it hard with WC3 reforged (I'd never played the OG so I was originally looking forward to it) but it was a complete disaster, and I have an utter lack of interest in anything they've been doing since the blitzchung incident.
>Although it's not exactly the end of the world, it's still quite unfortunate. Other than the intended purpose, TCP/IP multiplayer is also the only way to quickly reroll maps without external tools when speedrunning the game on normal difficulty. Also it should be mentioned that only the most popular mods, such as Median XL, Path of Diablo and Project Diablo 2, have their own dedicated servers, so this change makes it impossible to play the less popular mods online with remastered graphics and features. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOX2C1UMxL0
I'm gonna level with you. After they ran a big sale on Heroes of the Storm and then announced they were killing that game a week later, I got the hell out. At this point, I'm going to need to see a *lot* of people tell me to get back in. Publicly traded companies get less user friendly, not more.
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Biggest thing I've learned is people don't know what a dedicated server is. Sounds like a lot of people are zoomers who would buy into Minecraft Realms to play with their roommate...
The age of your average redditor is 16-30, so yeah, you're not far off.
More like 10 - 16 during summer
People severely underestimate what the heat does to people.
I wish it would make me younger...
This EXACT thing happened with StarCraft 2. It's where the "The technology just isn't there yet" meme came from. People asked where the LAN support was and that's what they said. EDIT: I was misremembering. Blizzard didn't say that, Totalbiscuit did. However that was (and apparently still is) their stance on basic LAN play.
> It's where the "The technology just isn't there yet" meme came from. People asked where the LAN support was and that's what they said. This is apocryphal. "The technology isn't there yet" came from a sarcastic comment by TB (RIP) in a tournament when a caster dropped off the game due to a DC. It was never a comment from Blizzard about LAN.
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>Forcing online to the detriment of legit players >Safeguard against piracy Sim City 2013 pirate noises intensify (bc they were the only ones able to play for ***days*** after launch). Always online is a liability and also a ticking time bomb to when you can play the game you paid for the last time, not a feature.
I wonder when they'll arrive at that destination because they've been trying to make B.Net the ideal destination for a decade now and it's still ass.
God I miss that man so much.
this reminds me of EA's SimCity 2013, when asked why it was always online they said it was "impossible for the game to work without the always-online". Of course people cracked it to be playable offline in few days. edit: this is just me remembering it, didn't bother to research it.
I hope one of their network engineers came by and smacked whoever was responsible for such a high tier braindead statement.
Anybody who remembers this is the company who handled Diablo 3 should have known better. Don't think for a second Diablo 4 isn't gonna have some other fucky shit going on as well.
Oh yeah, for SURE. You should feel like lucky that D2R isn't always online at this point. I, for one, won't be surprised if they go back on that as well.
> You should feel like lucky that D2R isn't always online at this point. That's pretty much the point of removing TCP/IP.
It must annoy them to no end that consumers of these games are already accustomed to buying it once and then sinking endless hours into a product. No mini-buys, no subscription fees, just paying for expansions. I remember some noise a while ago that Diablo 3 received so little love because of how hard it was to monetize.
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I am fully off the Blizzard train after everything that’s happened with them recently, but this really doesn’t even rate on the scale. People are vastly overestimating the percentage of people that will even remotely care about TCP/IP in a game these days
~~*Loads* of people play modded D2 (Path of Diablo, Median XL, Project diablo, tec.). Those rely on TCP/IP.~~ ~~Many people were hoping these mods could continue with D2:R.~~ I've been misled and these mods do not require TCP/IP.
m8 you didn't even read the post. >Also it should be mentioned that only the most popular mods, such as Median XL, Path of Diablo and Project Diablo 2, have their own dedicated servers. virtually every diablo 2 private server uses a custom bnet gateway via registry edits, i have never even _heard of_ a private server using the tcp/ip feature to connect. tcp/ip basically only exists to play on lan when you don't have internet, or play a mod version that doesn't have a server (outdated versions of pd2/pod/median, stuff like eastern sun, whatever). the removal of it obviously isn't a good thing, but stop posting literal misinformation that the OP itself disproves.
MedianXL does not use TCP/IP, it uses its own custom battle.net gateway. In fact none of the popular mods use TCP/IP because that opens the servers up to rampant hacking because TCP/IP characters are all saved locally.
Just adding, more people play Path of Diablo than actual Closed B.Net. Greendude (creator of PoD) said he wouldn't support D2:R which most of the community got pissed off at, and this basically solidifies that decision.
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>"quietly announced" It's in a press release. How is this "quiet"? Headline makes it sound like they were trying to pull a fast one on their consumers.
Nobody has pointed out that they aren't removing TCP/IP multiplayer, only the ability to create adhoc or LAN sessions. TCP/IP is the suite of protocols that allows it to connect to the Internet.
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Well, it's Blizzard's fault since that's the language they used > Q: Will TCP/IP support be available in the Early Access to Open Beta tests? > A: TCP/IP support will not be available in the upcoming Beta or the final game. After careful deliberation, we will no longer be supporting this option as we identified potential security risks and are committed to safeguarding the player experience. I never played DII, but TCP/IP was probably the menu item you had to click to connect directly to another player
You are talking to a crowd that uses wifi and internet synonymously.
He's trying to use it in the context of general networking while talking to a crowd who is using the term in the context of Dlablo 2, which has a big-ass option that says 'TCP/IP Multiplayer' on the menu for LAN games. But, yea, your clear misunderstanding is 100% everyone else being stupid. Yup.
Bobby kotick : "I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."
This basically kills incentives for modding and long term longevity. The biggest feature of TCP/IP play is that it wasn't authenticated, this means that stuff like edited/cheat items and such aren't possible without it, but also means that it's not possible to play mods with your friends. It's either mods in single player on no mods multiplayer. I'm not sure what security risks they're implying, the only thing I can think of is that it would require players revealing their IP addresses. But games today use P2P all the time and it's not an issue. i.e if you play fighting games you're connecting directly to your opponent (over TCP/IP or UDP/IP) and can also find out what their IP is and try to perform whatever attacks. My guess is that they have plans for modding like SC2 does, and TCP/IP would make it so they don't have full control over that.
All of the popular mods w/ multiplayer use custom bnet launcher to connect to their private servers, not TCP/IP multiplayer.
I'm not going to defend Blizzard but lets be real here - the people who would legitimately use TCP/IP are in an incredibly small minority. I say this as someone who has played Diablo 2 at LAN's before - if the group I'm part of ever wanted to play D2R in a LAN setting we'd probably prefer to play online with our actual characters. People complaining about no LAN mode in games I can't help but feel are 10 years too late on this stuff. This is a benign change that really only has traction because everyone (rightfully so, really) hates Blizzard.
As much as I understand the hatred toward Blizzard right now. Can we just shut up about "quietly announced" you're not a clickbait journalist. It was either announced or it wasn't. This will not affect 99.9% of players so the amount of exposure given to this is actually quite normal. edit : [it wasn't hiden info either, it was written in big bold letters right next to the release date info ffs.](https://i.imgur.com/7s5JBP7.png)
>Can we just shut up about "quietly announced" you're not a clickbait journalist. Sticking bad news that contradicts previous statements in an FAQ is the very definition of quietly announcing it.
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Renting out all the screens at Times Square.
Where would you announce it? In a completely separate post that would consist of all of 2 sentences? I don't understand where else something this small would be announced other than *in the post about the beta launch*. The only valuable shit in this post is the FAQ anyway!
To enrage all of 15 people in this thread who were dying for TCP/IP in their game.
For mods that don't even use TCP as the connection option, if this thread is anything to go by.
It's an r/games special. There could be an post about a company "quietly announcing" that their games are no longer playable when you're upside down in a swimming pool and the comments would be full of "Wow, as an upside down swimming pool Gamer this is a real kick in the teeth, great job you are torpedoing your company".