You cannot play Diablo 2 resurrected after 30 days of being offline

> It benefits the user AND the developer

Notably it benefits good faith developers. I.e., the developers we actually want making games. The developers that lose under this model are the ones that make poor quality games.

Though I admit it does not solve every dark pattern.

> On Steam if you don't like a game, or if it doesn't work for you, you can get a full refund no questions asked as long as it's within 14 days and with less than 2 hours playtime.

There's a hole here: that 14 days is from time of _purchase_ not _access_.

I preordered _Humankind_ a month or two before launch, because it was listed as supporting MacOS. At launch, it didn't. It didn't get Mac support until 3 weeks later, even though that functionality was barely alpha quality with huge graphics and playability bugs. (Even today, months later, Mac support is barely at beta quality. And if you're on M1 you've got to manually configure the app for being run on Rosetta.)

I waited 12 days after launch before giving up and requesting a refund. That refund was denied, because they had taken my money months before. Steam support was unmoved by my assertion that the developer was flat out lying about Mac playability, and that I literally had no way of playing the game as advertised.

Be careful with your preorders, y'all.

> Consumers need to demand better refund systems from the big console makers.

Nope. Don't let them self-regulate. They had their chance, free market blah blah blah.

We need to demand legislators update consumer protection laws for all this "you don't own, you rent" crap, because it's become way more pervasive than just video games and movies.

Heated seats in BMWs are now a "service"; I wish I were joking. And Tesla full self driving and supercharging, even though they are purchased features, do not pass to a new owner if the car is sold.

That refund system for Steam only exists because the ACCC forced them to comply with Australian consumer law.

And Valve still punish Australia for that by refusing to sell hardware here directly. No Index or Steam Deck for us.

The only problem is that—ironically for a thread about the problems of DRM—this forces stores to implement some type of DRM scheme. GOG can't reasonably offer as generous a refund policy as Steam, because once you've downloaded a game, there's no way to give it back.

It's legally mandated in the EU.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...

Honestly all of the refunds I’ve done on Xbox have been completely painless.

I heard it was pretty easy to get refunded for Diablo 2 Resurrected by Microsoft on Xbox at least.

Exactly, it’s like Frog And Toad. “These game companies must be punished so they stop abusing customers!” cried Toad as he bought another game.

if you're looking for a good alternative to diablo, I highly recommend the torchlight series

It had severe launch issues that was long ongoing even for 1-2 months. It's much better now though and they are still optimizing it with the latest row currently in testing, which I think may solve these issues for good.

The problem as I understand it was an architectural decision to remove the realms (regional groups of servers like USEast/West/EU/Asia) of Diablo 2 "Classic" so that everyone can play with each other. More fun that way, right? However, Diablo 2 has pretty lousy netcode (consider it's two decades old!) and turns out that one does not simply rewrite it to sync your heroes regularly to a centralized location as you played, turning out to cause a terrible bottleneck. Many such sync requests seem to have just straight out failed at peak hours, with characters losing hours of gameplay or even losing the characters altogether!

This is, again, much better now thanks to more or less emergency mitigations. But it took them a few months and it's of course a major goof up to not think this through better. By the time it was fixed, many had started losing interest in the game.

It's hard to extrapolate networking from testing to massive scales, I understand that, but these are network architects with years if not decades in the business of launching games and MMORPG's. _Someone_ should have been waving a little red flag here and told "hey, you do realize we're centralizing a core part of the game that was never planned to be centralized, and if these sync requests fail it's going to ruin their gameplay. So we're taking a risk and with very real fallout as well."

But maybe someone did... Maybe many in fact did. Such warnings may not be the end of the story unfortunately.

> Have the servers been down ever since?

no, it works just fine.

the issues the original poster highlighted had to do with launch problems.

Their IP and player base just got bought for 70b. They will make new 'blizzard' games, the way Disney makes StarWars movies.

But I actually welcome it. Kotick has run blizzard into the ground, on the formula 'maximize profits instead of player satisfaction', which is the opposite of the formula that made the blizzard name. At least MS will, presumably, milk the IP long-term-responsibly.

Gaming companies are incredible. Anyone who loves games tend to hate the large gaming companies. Yet they print money and will continue to put out shit products year after year. So people can say X company is dead while they get aquired for 70 billion dollars.

What a crazy industry.

Apparently the execs at Microsoft don't read Hacker News.

They botched the Warcraft III remaster hard, and I can't forgive them for that. It doesn't matter that they farmed it out. They chose to farm it out, and they chose to ship it in the state we got.

Take all that along side all this sexual harassment and anti-worker BS they've been pulling for decades, and I just don't care enough anymore. I don't need anything Blizzard wants to sell any more. I don't need to buy something to tarnish my memories of fun games. I don't need to replay those games if they're made under atrocious conditions. I'm no longer willing to give my money to a company that is emblematic of everything wrong with video games.

Now with other companies pulling that same BS, and now some are coming out in favor of NFTs?

Fuck 'em. I don't need AAA games. Indie titles are just as good, and I've got a hundred other things vying for my free time.

Most of their IP is dead at this point; Warcraft is a dead horse they’ve been beating for the last decade, StarCraft is effectively abandoned, and Diablo 3 was a blatant cash grab from day 1 with a mediocre game behind it. Hearthstone and Overwatch are doing ok as esports but those aren’t the Blizzard IP I actually like.

To think that any future games will be better than what we’ve gotten over the last decade is just being in denial that they’re Activision now. They have continued to mine the nostalgia of the player base with mediocre remakes and retread content and, combined with the fact that it’s now public knowledge how toxic Blizzard culture was during the “golden era”, it has destroyed most of the cultural value that IP had.

AAA development slog like what is apparently happening with D4 rarely bodes well for fun. Dev work apparently began in 2014 and it's not likely to be released until 2023 at the earliest.

Overwatch released over a hand full of years ago, it already had its "couple of months of hype" since then.

A game should work in single player mode no matter the network quality or censorship by any of the layers in-between.

It's one thing (and annoying enough) if multiplayer servers are shut down after a couple years without opening the source of the server or at least distributing VMware images. But single-player functionality should always work, because why should I otherwise buy a game for 50+ €?!

The issue is their toxic drm.

Doesn’t the Xbox require this for all games?

The points are

-- that they are mandating your machine to be online, and

-- that the working state of the product will depend on infrastructure outside your power

and possibly more.

You are getting down voted but that is what most players care about it. It's the reason COD and every 2K or sports game gets worse every year. It's the reason Pokemon somehow continues to become more and more souless. It's the reason companies can put out shit and still print money.

You are responsible for your actions. What you fund, you encourage.

I'm not even talking about the politics. Just the shit games with the crappy player-hostile business models.

Blizzard used to make awesome games that were fun to play. They came up with some of the most enduring game franchises, and their games are still classics. Now, not so much. Actually, not at all. It's all just repetitive shite based on the same old tired universes.

Would be nice to only play good ones. If only you could predict the experience you'd have by the developer.

well, you can buy the older version which can run under nearly any version and doesn't require to phone home before launching, afaik

Yes there are a lot of good little unthinking consumers around sucking at corporate mother's teats. The future is bright.

For the tiny tiny tiny fraction of users who will still be playing the game at that point, it will be a sad day. Most gamers do not make purchasing decisions based on something that might happen twenty years from now, since >99.9% of them will have moved on from the game by that point.

> I can still play ...

But do you? I mean, perhaps you do, but most folks don't. That's why I emphasized the question of harm a gamer is likely to suffer.

well the Diablo 2 servers have been online continuously for over 20 years already, so I'm not exactly sure this is a valid concern for the vast majority of people.

> So the game is CLEARLY not yours.

What's important to me, and to most gamers, is whether I can play a game for the duration of time that I desire to do so. So when I'm looking at D2 resurrected, I'm thinking something like this:

"If I buy this game, the longest I'd probably play it for is about a year. In future years I may return to it for briefer and briefer windows, asymptotically decreasing toward zero minutes per year as time approaches infinity. I think it's likely that Blizzard will keep the servers running for at least 20 years based on past performance. What is the area under the curve outside of twenty years proportional to the total value I intend to extract from the game?"

For me, I estimate the area at around 0. Even if I thought that a tenth of my total playtime would occur outside the initial 20 year window (extremely unlikely and generous estimate -- probably nobody exists like this), what is the present value of that future enjoyment? At a 4% discount rate and a fifty dollar initial purchase, the present value is $3. There's just not enough there for most people to be bothered about.

> The problem is forcing people to be playing the game regularly or loose whatever they have "accomplished".

That problem isn't the one documented in the link we are discussing. Can you point me to some kind of citation that shows this is happening? I've not heard about it and a brief google search does not reveal anything.

That's the worst part of playing Diablo 2 "classic" over Battle.net (rather than open Internet) : after 6 months of inactivity, your character and all the items you had stored on them are deleted from Blizzard's servers ! (And you don't get to keep an open copy of them.)

It's actually explained in the FAQ section of this post: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo2/23658118/diablo-ii-r...

It is listed on the sale page: https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/product/diablo_ii_resurrect...

> Internet connection, Battle.net® desktop app and Battle.net® Account required to play.