Submitting a review for consideration is easy; please first read Slashdot's book review guidelines. Updated: 2008114 by samzenpus
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.
So, GPG Online? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, isn't this what Microsoft and Sony have done for consoles and other game companies have already done for the PC? I wouldn't expect it to be big news that Starcraft 2 will be expected to keep up with features Battlefield 2, Team Fortress 2, and Supreme Commander have.
It's like a dance! (Score:5, Insightful)
One step forward, two steps back! Cha cha cha! Thanks guys, but some of us do, you know, LAN?
Re:It's like a dance! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
"*Achievement unlocked!* prepare to be boarded!"
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. I don't like Diablo II online because it's too laggy (even though I'm on 15Mbps fiber). If I want to play with my friends I start a LAN game and we play over Hamachi. I'm quite saddened that Diablo III won't be able to do that.
Re: (Score:2)
they'll compel you into their courtroom in the sponsership of their judge to rule how odd your fantasyland activities of Goatse Taco-Felcher Daggonmut (clvl 69 ass-grabber) is evidence that you are not to be within 50' of a minor and conditional release from the Court as to be a registered "public offender."
Perhaps this is just feeding the troll... but do you have any evidence that Blizzard has done anything of the sort? I'm quite sure that if there were such an occurrence, the news would have been all over Slashdot, and yet I can recall nothing...
Moderation is fighting words and libel/slander. (Score:2, Interesting)
HeronBlademaster,
I didn't call anyone or even would label you a troll. I hear you easily because none have painted you.
Who labeled that post as troll you think? If Slashdot was an open system, then it would actually display the moderations with the userID of the moderator. You speak of such an occurence of 'news' from a corporation that was never part of the "freedom of speech" clause. What entitled you ever to be a champertain or to hear the skirmish of someone that you aren't party with? That's not g
Re: (Score:2)
It is quite possible that all 5 of those points are true, however none of them even remotely resemble your earlier remark, which I requote here for your convenience:
they'll compel you into their courtroom in the sponsership of their judge to rule how odd your fantasyland activities of Goatse Taco-Felcher Daggonmut (clvl 69 ass-grabber) is evidence that you are not to be within 50' of a minor and conditional release from the Court as to be a registered "public offender."
In any case, it looks like most of your complaints are applicable to virtually every software company in the world so I don't know what you're so worked up about Blizzard for.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I take two steps forward
I take two steps back
We come together cuz opposites attract
And you know: It ain't fiction
Just a natural fact
We come together cuz opposites attract
Sorry. Had to do it.
Re:It's like a dance! (Score:4, Insightful)
Being rich doesn't preclude you from being compensated, but that's either a nice little straw man or an entirely mistaken reading of my post.
What being rich from selling games should preclude is the attitude that the paying customers must jump through hoops because the rich development studios are going broke from people freeloading copies of the game. You can't be a big, profitable game company and be going broke from piracy at the same time. It's not possible.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
But of course, on the other hand, if you think "not buying out of protest" and "illegally downloading for your own enjoyment" are the same thing, you have serious mental deficiencies, and not only aren't the target audience for the game, but probably would be better off in a padded cell without computer access at all.
I mean, it's not like ban
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Entering a 20-character key once, that's fine.
Having to authenticate to a remote server every time you want to play, and being locked out of your game if either your connection or the servers' goes down, is a wholly different beast.
And as others have mentioned, LAN gaming should not involve remote authentication. In fact, a lot of LAN parties don't even have net access, especially if they're renting the venue, or sometimes you just don't feel like dicking with your iptables for a bunch of greasy IRC buddie
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's like a dance! (Score:4, Informative)
Not necessarily backwards as they are overcome some of the slowness of the old LAN days. Doesn't anyone else remember having to install IPX to get Starcraft to work? :)
Having to install IPX hasn't been a problem for years, so that argument doesn't even make sense any more.
We frequently have LAN parties with World of Warcraft with a single cable modem connection and can all play easily without a hitch.
Not everybody has a decent connection like that. Plenty of people are stuck on ADSL, where you're lucky if you have 256kbps upload. I'm sure I'll be thanking Blizzard for dropping LAN play when I've saturated my connection and suffer horrible lag, not to mention the lag we already get here in AU when playing on US servers.
The downside is having to have an internet connection, but the fact is internet is so ubiquitous these days it shouldn't make a difference.
Not every situation where you'd want to play games includes an internet connection. I've been to many LAN games held in halls and schools with 200+ people where there's not an internet connection in sight, and that's exactly the sort of situation where you'd want to load up a game and have 8 or more people roll over the legions of hell. No LAN play makes it impossible.
And this completely ignores the other benefit of LAN games, and that is hackable characters.
If someone else wants to join a LAN game that is already in progress, you can simply copy your existing character, rename it and free up the skill points so they're all ready to drop in and start playing in minutes with all the quests and waypoints set. Or to make the game quicker we'd create an amulet with the maximum number of bonuses you could place on an item.
Being able to edit the characters was one of the things that made it fun. We had competitions on who could hack up the best level 1 Hell-Difficulty character! Or we'd amp up the useless skills until you had level 200 Teeth and could one-shot bosses. It was stupid, silly fun, and that's part of what made the game last long after it should have gotten boring.
Granted, allowing local characters online was foolish, and they should have never had open Battle.Net. But dropping LAN play will mean that I, and a lot of my friends, won't be buying it. It'll be just like Hellgate:London.
Parent
Re:It's like a dance! (Score:5, Funny)
Pirating it will make it work on a LAN?
Wow, these clever pirates!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, yes they will. You can even setup WOW/WC3 to work on LAN if you pirate it and its an mmo not remotely setup to work that way. Obviously not much is known about the guts of d3s net setup but i'm sure it will be similar. You'll likely need to download a fairly light ap along with d2 to run the server on one machine and have everyone connect to it. Essentially battlenet will be hosted on your lan.
Sounds like something I know... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
OCD Compulsive Tidiness Achievement (Score:2, Funny)
Congratulations! You have unlocked the OCD Compulsive Tidiness Achievement for Diablo 2.
You picked up every single pile of gold, potion, ring, scroll, armor and weapon from the Blood Moor all the way to the Throne of Baal.
Re:OCD Compulsive Tidiness Achievement (Score:4, Funny)
Throne of Destruction. Baal is in the Worldstone Chamber.
Sorry, as someone who has wasted literally thousands of hours of my life playing the game, I feel obligated to correct you.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
> Apparently you didn't notice Baal and his throne on the final level of Worldstone Keep?
I did. What's your point?
> Protip: Baal runs don't usually involve killing Baal. :)
You clearly haven't played to 99 since 1.10.
Re: (Score:2)
Have you been looking over my shoulder? That's exactly how I play. You make it sound like a bad thing.
The most important feature... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I hope you mean 800x600. Or do you play with your monitor sideways?
Seriously though, I've always been confused why they don't issue a quick patch to Diablo II to let us play it at a higher resolution. I can't think it would take very many changes...
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously though, I've always been confused why they don't issue a quick patch to Diablo II to let us play it at a higher resolution.
In all fairness, they did increase the resolution from 640x480 to 800x600 with the Diablo II LoD Expansion pack. This was a huge benefit to play (and re-play) motivation.
What I'm surprised about is that they haven't done anything for Starcraft's resolution. The only thing I can figure is that at some point the game reached an "untouchable" status where they didn't feel it was
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What I'm surprised about is that they haven't done anything for Starcraft's resolution. The only thing I can figure is that at some point the game reached an "untouchable" status where they didn't feel it was right or fair to make such a sweeping change.
I don't think they wanted to change the viewport size--can make a big difference.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's one of the big advantages of having a 3D game engine--when you change the resolution you can effectively "zoom" in and out.
Starcraft was all sprites and 2d. This means that every graphic in the game is actually the size you see on screen. If they had wanted to keep the aspect the same, and the viewport the same, but allow multiple resolutions, they would have had to make more graphics.
If a stretched picture is all you want, most LCDs give you the option--you can stretch 640x480 to 1680x1050 if you wa
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Blizzard is really trying to appeal to SC's hardcore crowd with SC2. They're purposefully doing things to force you to micromanage - like making you "refill" the Vespene Geysers.
They will not let you "zoom out" as you could in Supreme Commander. It would cause far, far to much of a change in
Re: (Score:2)
A guy wrote a 3dfx glide wrapper that I've been using successfully with Wine for ages, it's available here: http://www.svenswrapper.de/english/index.html [svenswrapper.de]
There's lots of nifty features, including being able to resize to an arbitrary resolution (note: it just makes everything bigger, since there are still only textures for 800x600). However, you can't play with it and mods at the same time (mods require you to force Direct3D rendering). That's not a downside for legit Battle.net players, though.
Re: (Score:2)
IIRC you can play Starcraft on battle.net and Diablo II using a direct IP connection using mods as long as all the players in the game have the mod, so it could potentially be a downside.
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.edgeofnowhere.cc/viewtopic.php?t=348984 [edgeofnowhere.cc]
Will they fix the security issues? (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently, Warcraft III requires your password to be 3 characters long and is case insensitive (clod). Hopefully the newer version will include some revamped security...
(I've only tested this with Warcraft III, not sure about other games).
Re: (Score:2)
I can confirm that passwords are case insensitive for Diablo II as well.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
WoW passwords are case insensitive as well. (Really, I'm not joking, they are.)
Achievement unlocked! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Achievement unlocked! (Score:5, Funny)
http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20080804 [ctrlaltdel-online.com]
Not sure if that was a reference or not...
Also this was apparently news about a month ago. (At least achievements)
Parent
Why do people write this stuff? (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope this is zealotry on behalf of the fansite rather than Blizzard developers actually claiming (with a straight face) that Diablo III will be unhackable. Diablo III will be hacked, in the same way that every Blizzard game has been hacked, in the same way that virtually every retail game on the market has been hacked. The true test will be how vigilant Blizzard is in policing this sort of thing, how quickly they can patch compromised releases, their ability to prevent cheaters from poisoning the community at-large.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Why do people write this stuff? (Score:4, Informative)
Characters were stored on the realms(battle.net) even in diablo 2. This was the "Closed Realm" option. "Open Realms" let you play your character in single player etc, and were trivial to hack, by design.(the file was entirely plain hex values for hp and so forth)
For the most part, the only "hack" on the closed realms was duplicated items.(though to quite an absurd degree at times) There were not many hacks other than a map hack, which wasn't THAT good.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I've been playing Diablo 2 again recently (singleplayer, offline) and have wondered how duplicating items worked on closed realms. If you assume that the server knows what items each character starts with and what items are subsequently dropped, which seems like a reasonable assumption, surely it's fairly straightforward to do a periodic check and determine the legitimacy of each item?
I suppose it must be harder than that since the developers aren't stupid, but for the life of me I can't see how such rampan
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent down.
This is coming from someone who helped run a successful business on selling Diablo 2 items. Trust me, duplicated items were small-time. We sold thousands upon thousands of duplicated Soj (stone of jordan) rings at a HUGE profit of over $30,000.
But the real interesting stuff was the IST hacked items and the rarely generated bugged items that you could get the game to produce under certain circumstances. Like a cloth cap that reduces physical damage by 103%. Yep, you were invulnerable to p
Re: (Score:2)
For the most part, the only "hack" on the closed realms was duplicated items.(though to quite an absurd degree at times) There were not many hacks other than a map hack, which wasn't THAT good.
But what hacks existed were quite... Powerful. The white gloves [newd2event.net] for instance. There were white rings too.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
your solution although it sounds simple, is also simple to break. CRCs are very short, are easily tampered with (through hacked system drivers etc) and so on...
but have you ever tried to connect to battle net with a no cd crack for a bliz title? sadly the b.net connection is refused, because to do no CD you need to remove software from the exe, that is easily checked for on connection to blizzard controlled servers.
various cheats are often easily detected, although network sniffing based attacks on battle.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
What could possibly go wrong?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure if you're trolling or just ignorant. I think you meant to say that every game is hacked to whatever extent it can be. That's not the same thing as Blizzard hacks have often been elaborations on spoofs (D2/SC Mapping, Duping, Bnet spoofing, etc) and it's unlikely that this will continue into D3. //pedantic
Re: (Score:2)
I meant it in the context that the article meant it. And no, I'm not trolling (can't say whether I'm ignorant or not... if I was I doubt I'd know it).
Ultimately, we won't know until it comes out. I'm basing my opinion on of history, trends, human nature. You're basing yours off of... hope?
Interopability with BnetD? (Score:2, Funny)
What features are not supported by this update?
What backward compatibility is supported?
When will BnetD be updated to work with Battle.net 2.0?