[citation][nom]frederico[/nom]My god some of the comments here..Let me explain something very simple, in 1998, there wasn't much internet around, creating a game like starcraft with spawned copies meant that me and my buddies could play the game without having to fork out for however many individual copies of the game we would've needed...We all played the game in our dorms, dozens of us, yet I don't remember seeing a single goddamn starcraft box anywhere.. who bought it? oh yeah, thats right, we didn't buy the game. We just bloody copied it.Its 2010, everyone has the internet now. I bought a copy of the game, my brother had to buy a copy of the game, my 5 friends have bought copies of the game, it all just works, everyone is happy. The only people who aren't happy are these really angry ones who are endlessly banging on about the 'principles' of it. They spend all day on their unlimited 24/7 internet connections logging onto Amazon to vote the game zero, to log on here and gripe, moan and whinge.. about the fact that you need an internet connection to play a game in 2010... about the big evil corporation having the gall to charge us money for a product.. and anything else they can tack on to that argument so they have some kind of 'list'..Let me put this very simply... if Blizzard lanned the game.. then would I, my brother and my 5 friends have a copy? what do you think the answer to that question is? Blizzard would loose MILLIONS. If many have the option to take a game for free, they'll take it. For me, my bro and friends we bought the game, we're enjoying it, battlenet works and we're all happy.[/citation]
I was one of those stupid enough to actually buy it.
I also bought diablo, warcraft 2, diablo 2 and its expansion. And I remember very well how it felt to be one of those stupid enough to buy the games. Cause it meant that unlike those pirating it, I couldn't actually play them!
Diablo 2 as an example (I played that the most).
Buying the game. Yay. Installed it. Hmm, it's not working. Two weeks later, blizard tells me its because I'm an early adopter and my dvd drive (costing the equivalent of 200 euro at the time) doesn't work with their copy protection. After a patch or two it works. Playing single player. Trying battle.net. Cool - I can play with friends. Oh I can't, cause battle.net is always lagging or unavailable. Hmm. Two years later, oww battle.net works! Nice. Playing on and off for a year. Introducing expiring characters at some point. Damn, lost my gear. Later lost a couple keys to cheating, which is okay I suppose. 2007. Relogging more than a couple times an hour gives temp ban of up to 24 hours, except for spam bots. 2008, at it again. Battle.net no longer laggy, but still unreliable and now filled with spambots. Lost my account because I was accused of advertising for a malicious website ; which I appearently did by using my opel.cc web address as account name. 2009. Getting last cdkey temp banned for unknown reason (for a month). Losing my characters in the process.
Now that's how diablo worked. Starcraft being a lan game primarily didn't suffer from all of the symptoms above, only from some of them (the copy protection and other reliability issues + all the normal issues with ipx games).
So bottom line - with how classic battle.net worked, people were really better off without using it.
The new battle.net has only been around for months, so all the faults haven't been documented yet. But since they introduced it into wow, I've come to notice some of the reliability issues it has. It's been down for hours at a time. And the support system for legit users has been handicapped to a point where you could hardly call it support. Taking a month to get an email response from billing. Taking between 2 and 8 days to get a response to a ticket issue (gm blamed ticket flood from sc2 launch and an abundance of problems with it for the delay in response time. The response time's been like that longer than sc2 has been around though).
In short, when you pay for a modern blizzard game you're really at the mercy of people who don't care about you, and who haven't bothered expanding service resources to meet it's current or projected needs.
So why pay for software, if the only benefits you gain from it are non-existent most of the time anyway? It really can be compared to buying a season pass to a 6 flags that is scheduled to be closed down most of the time.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram