

Why Diablo 3′s always-online DRM is a good thing - adeelarshad82
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/129688-why-diablo-3s-always-online-drm-is-a-good-thing

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kaolinite
"None of this would be possible without permanent Battle.net connectivity."

Er, no, all of it would be possible. There is absolutely no need to have a
permanent connection. And hey, even if we assume that it _wouldn't_ be
possible, why not make the cloud stuff an option that you can turn off? Maybe
some people are responsible and keep their computers backed up and would
rather not lose access to the game they paid for each time their internet
connection flickers.

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mrsebastian
Well, it would be possible, but it would be slower, clunkier, more prone to
errors, etc.

As soon as you store some data locally, you have to do a lot of sanity
checking, and synchronisation is a pain, and so on.

Personally I think you should have the option of making an 'always offline'
character, with no access to the AH, but I think that would involve Blizzard
putting too much data on the client side -- which it obviously doesn't want to
do.

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jiggy2011
Why would it be clunkier and more error prone?

I remember back in 2000 using gamespy to see which games my friends were in
and join them with a single double-click, pretty much friction free.

I don't see why being able to hex edit is necessarily a problem, if I want to
play through the game with a fully decked out character why couldn't I?

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nextparadigms
How many sales of Diablo 3 did they have so far? Something tells me not as
many as they expected.

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skyhook_mockups
What makes you say that? The article mentions 2million preorders

