D3: No LAN play.

How should Blizzard handle Multiplaying?

  • Bnet only

    Votes: 2 1.6%
  • Bnet and SP offline only no TCP/LAN (proposed by Blizzard)

    Votes: 1 0.8%
  • All the options D2 has

    Votes: 43 33.6%
  • All the options D2 has except Open Bnet (allow SP over LAN or TCP)

    Votes: 82 64.1%

  • Total voters
    128
Re: D3: No LAN play.

I don't understand this decision at all. I can't imagine it being very time consuming to *** a LAN/TCP-IP option.

And i didn't know that b.net might cost money, if it does it's really wrong of Blizzard not to give us LAN/TCP-IP as an alternative.

As far as the muling goes there should atleast be a shared stash, it's just stupid if you have to mule.
 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

As far as the muling goes there should atleast be a shared stash, it's just stupid if you have to mule.

"if you have to mule" if we're that lucky, there may simply be no muling option.

On the other hand, its a new day and I'm feeling a bit more positive. Several of Jay's comments made it clear that his understanding of D2 might not be the same as ours. Perhaps its just open bnet that's out, perhaps open bnet will remain. I'm not giving up hope completely, yet.



 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

I'm not happy about the decision as it appears at the moment, although I'm still not sure if they mean they're removing LAN, TCP/IP or both. (Thanks to the technical answers to my question, but having been told they're different, which is being removed?)

I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second about the scale of the problem of muling though. It is entirely possible that the game design is going to make high-powered itemness less important. Untwinked might become considerably more viable, and not so far behind twinked play. So even if we can't twink, it might not destroy the game as some seem to think. I'm very much of the opinion that there's a lot in D2's gameplay that can change us away from the needs we've developed.

One real downer I can see is the drop mechanics: each player gets a personal drop, invisible to the other party members. That is, monsters are dropping as many items as there are players. That's going to make for incredibly skewed wealth in multiplayer games, unless single-player has a boosted drop to offset that. In short, I can foresee the same scenario of the "item" sections of build guides being useless for SP. (Did you know there's a Dual Dream Enchantress guide? Who the heck has two Dreams?)
 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

There is no way whatsoever that they will make items less important than they were in D2. I do believe they are fully aware of just how addicting item hunting is for a lot of people. You're a little too focused on the SP side of thinking. As in, "oh ,if we cannot twink, maybe it's not that important". Doesn't work like this. SP is definetly not as big as b.net and for b.net there are no changes in terms of twinking, trading and muling. If anything, they plan to expand this, as is aparant in the interview. If loot was less important, they surely wouldn't drop individual loot for every player but would let everyone see the same crap if it didn't matter.

(Did you know there's a Dual Dream Enchantress guide? Who the heck has two Dreams?)

Far as I know, on b.net, the question is "Who the heck doesn't have 2 dreams?".

Me, I don't even know what dreams look like... (All I have are nightmares :badteeth: )



 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

although I'm still not sure if they mean they're removing LAN, TCP/IP or both. (Thanks to the technical answers to my question, but having been told they're different, which is being removed?)

Taking it to another level...

You want to talk to your friend on the telephone. The ability to talk on the telephone (IE the telephone network) is equivalent to a LAN. It is merely the fact that a computer can be physically connected to another computer.

However, before you talk to your friend, you need to both be talking the same language, else you won't understand each other. This is the same as TCP/IP.

So, your question is pretty stupid :whistling:. Unfortunately, it's stupid because the terms have become all equivalent, even though they aren't at all (technically) equivalent. Without Blizzard writing code allowing TCP/IP - LAN connections, if you wish to play with other people, you will need to connect to a Blizzard server. In other words, a TCP/IP - WAN connection. You can still play with your friends, its just you'll have to use Blizzards middleman (in this case, battlenet).

The biggest problem is that WAN and LAN have become equivalent, thanks to the advent of high speed internet. LAN is a small network, usually enjoyed by friends. WAN is a large area network. But now that everyone has high band, high latency internet, LAN and WAN have become synonymous, pretty much. People generally play on LANs for lack of lag etc (not a problem now that internet speeds have caught up), because they're cheaper (no download limits, no need to have an ISP) or because they just want to play with a group of friends and don't want to interact with that big old online world that's out there.



 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

LAN and WAN have become synonymous, pretty much. People generally play on LANs for lack of lag etc (not a problem now that internet speeds have caught up)

Dear Australia,

Eff You.

Love,
Blizzard
and Silo

:badteeth:


Sorry, couldn't resist, and excellent example silo.



 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

Has anyone started any kind of petition against not LAN play yet? I know there's a few polls around, but maybe a petition would be better?
 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

It's an amazing piece of code, indeed.

Quite entertaining at times.

Anyways, not having LAN does suck, still I hope the forums will still have an SP community of some sorts. Even with no MP, trading and muling I'd still love to exchange thoughts and ideas with the SP crowd like in the past. Even in the next game.


 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

Nice work, Thyiad. Some of the recent MP games I've attended have been fantastic - people looking out for each other, assisting with body recovery, sharing items, joking around. Just night and day to my experience on battle.net.
 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

Even though I've used LAN very little, I'd still sign a petition if one came along. I gotta look out for my peeps. :grouphug:

A little off topic, but this was posted at diii.net. There may be less reason to worry about trading, but again... it's early. No one knows anything. :rolleyes:

Exerpt from the transcript of BlizzCast 5:

BlizzCast 5 said:
"Bashiok: Cool. On the same vein of item storage, anybody that played Diablo II, to a great extent, or maybe a medium extent probably had item mules, which were characters specifically created just to hold items for your main characters. What are your thoughts on mules? Are those going to be coming back? Do we see a need for them in future Diablo titles?"

"Jay Wilson: Well, I think as long as there is limited inventory space, which pretty much as long as there's limited hard drive space there's going to be limited inventory space, you're going to have people who are going to want to mule, like, you want to store items. Storing items is fun, like collecting items is fun; that being said, the way that people had to do it in Diablo II was not fun at all. So, what we're going to be looking at is, you know, generally we don't want to encourage mulling, we don't want to make it the way people want to do- simply because the way it was done in Diablo II wasn't fun. So, we're going to make a lot of changes overall to how inventory's done.
One of the first probably- I think all these changes will actually be quite popular, which is one of them is going to be we're going to give people more inventory in general- just a little bit bigger inventory. It's also easier with a one-slot system actually, because you don't have the items eating up so much screen real estate, you don't have the risk of an especially large item just destroying the inventory space, but creating tons and tons of room for lots of little items. So, we have a lot more control with that. The other one is we're going to give people lots of ways to expand and deal with your inventory and… more info on that, coming in the future. And then, the last one is we really want to make it easier for you to be able to share and trade items with other people and other characters on the same account. We've talked about ideas like a shared stash, or a mail system like World of Warcraft has, and we haven't nailed down exactly which one of those we want to do, but we're definitely going to do something like that, that's going to make it really easy for you if you've got, a witch doctor and a barbarian character, and you find that awesome witch doctor drop and you want to share it, it'll be super-easy to do that."

Hopefully this doesn't pertain to bnetters only, but it may still be that trading between seperate SP accounts off of their servers might still be impossible without an ATMA-like program... And it doesn't change the fact that no LAN = teh suck.
 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

One thing that speaks against them adding fees is the fact that people generally only play one MMO at a time (I'm guessing here, but still), and they would not want to cut in on the WoW players. Maybe. :)
 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

I love the 'fellowship' LAN games my friends and I hold between christmas and new years. A good bit of trash is talked, it's sociable, as much as a pile of geek in a room filled with the hum of computers can be. 'Twould be a shame for them to consciously cripple an otherwise promising game.
 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

Hopefully this doesn't pertain to bnetters only

It said "share with other people or other characters on the same account". Account? Sounds like Bnet speak to me. I'm not holding out much hope this is going to be anything other than a server-side option, thus forcing more people onto Battle.Net.



 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

but i'm a hoarder. what should i do?
and shared stash should come bnet only and fee only
 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

I would have also been all "the sky is falling" if i hadn't also played a game which had no SP or TCP/IP option.

Just because bnet drove you to SP in d2 doesn't mean bnet 2.0 in D3 WILL be the same. Internet connections are better, blizz took notice to improve bnet, and its not like blizz has taken your money for D3 then changed what you thought you were getting.

Try to see the forrest for all the trees
 
Re: D3: No LAN play.

I play an MMO it's fine for what it is. But I can't play with the whole community that is the SPF because there are different realms and servers.

Bnet isn't necessarily the problem, bnetters are and that won't change.

Oh the downtime will be scheduled, the updates frequent, etc. But the obnoxious dickwad will still be there and frankly I don't want to interact with them. I want to interact with the SPF community that I have grown to like. Not just the ones in Eu or West or East, but ALL of them. No LAN means I can't. That's why for me, D3 has just lost all of the shine it had. It was so so promising and one really idiotic, cheapskating decision ruined it.
 
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