this is it

[BooTx]

You may not care about MP, but the majority of us do.

That's debatable. Even for a game like Unreal Tournament 2004 which is obviously designed to be a multiplayer experience, at least half the people who bought the game on PC never went online at all, and I would wager that a large majority spent most of their time playing single player.

According to Epic producer Tanya Jessen, 50% of Unreal Tournament 2004 owners never went online on PC.

Aside from the initial road bumps at launch, the internet requirement for single player has enabled the rest of us to enjoy the multi-player component free from hackers and cheaters who ruin the game with ill-gotten, ridiculously overpowered loot.

The game is a week old, so let's not bury that issue just yet. I'd also ask what you would consider "ill-gotten"? Once the RMAH is up people won't even have to play the game to get their ridiculously overpowered loot. How is it substantially different from somebody buying ridiculously overpowered loot from some Chinese farm shop like they did in Diablo 2? Once the RMAH is up, that's probably where most people are going to be buying it from anyway. The only difference now is that Blizzard has officially allowed it and will be profiting from it.

Ultimately, as errors grow increasingly infrequent over time, and server stability resolved, such objections will no longer retain their relevancy. Not that I expect you'd change your tune.

Of course I won't, because it is but one of a myriad of issues that I have with this system. And I would add that server issues, whether on Battle.net or otherwise, will always exist. They may not be the complete catastrophe that we've witnessed during this launch, but they'll still be there. All you have to do is look at Sony's network, or the Steam attack a few months back, to get an idea of what can happen when a group of people put their crosshairs on a company that they don't like.

To claim that broadband users won't ever be inconvenienced is absolutely ridiculous. Hell people are getting their accounts hacked left and right from what I'm seeing and at this point nobody really knows why. Could it be solved with an authenticator? Maybe, but the fact that it's happening at all for people who just want to play the game by themselves is absurd.

By the time Blizzard files for bankruptcy sometime in the year 2525, D3 will have become freeware and the online restrictions removed, so to what extent Blizzard's DRM will have on D3's obsolescence is, at this point, pure conjecture and, frankly, negligible when you consider how changes in OS and hardware will effect compatibility for older titles.

Did you really just state with conviction that Diablo 3 will become freeware and have its online restrictions removed, and then in the very same sentence tell me my argument is pure conjecture? That's pretty good.

And people still play 20+ year old games all the time; in many cases on modern hardware and operating systems.

Who's to say modding can't exist for single player games that require internet connections? The characters are stored server-side, but the game data could be modded provided Bliz released a toolkit and allowed mods to exist on privately hosted servers.

Giving users the ability to run "privately hosted servers" would undermine the entire point of this form of DRM and make cracking the game trivial (which is why Blizzard isn't doing it). If they allowed people to make mods (that were only allowed to change certain, approved aspects of the game of course) and then had to authorize their use on the server, then that completely neuters the modding community for that game.

Most of the greatest mods have only been possible because the devs have supported the community and provided toolkits for their creation.

Somewhat true, but I don't see how this helps your argument any when you consider the above paragraph.

Incidentally, when was the last time you played a new video game on any platform, BootX?

Is that relevant?