I was in the brawling ground on console with players that had around 100k each for Str, Dex, Int, and Vit.
Now I've got lots of socketed items with tier 14 gems and am only at around 26k for each.
Some gems are special, for example, instead of just Radiant Star Emerald, there are Radiant Star Emeralds of Courage. Is that a factor?
Also, I was told you have to socket gems one at a time or something to get the best effect. I tried that on a 3-socket helmet. I have three tier 14 emeralds in a White helmet and have 634 in SDIV each. Three guys I was playing with (they didn't know each other) had about 11k for each SDIV in each item! How?
So console online has already become open battle net eh?
Since day one of the development
It also kinda shows where we might be headed if they go too far with things like removing the AH/RMAH, removing the online-only requirement, and letting people freely mod their game.
It's a matter of whether or not you want a community that actually cares about where they are in relation to other players. That is good for some, bad for anothers (which can't deal with the harsh truth that they aren't the best sometimes, or even above average).
Of course some hypocrites (cough.. kr... cough... pp... cough... rn...) are gonna say that they need "x" for the game to be better, and that "y" feature ruined the game, but truth is, they just really want a game in which they can brag about their achievements with as little accessibility as possible (otherwise they have to actually compete with others to show if they are really good).
And then you need coding and development on all 3 fronts. Both "lan" and "open battle net" would open up the entire game code for everyone. That makes developing any sort of exploit/hack that much easier, with the entire client/server structure at their hands.
Also, DRM - which take it however you want (I'm also against it), but online only has succesfully prevented pirating of D3 and WoW (at least a good quality pirated version). So big win for them in that aspect.
The "online" part of D2 (security-wise) was so bad that people could figure out how to dupe items and make wallhacks 10+years ago. Imagine what those same people can do with today's knowledge and technology (nevermind, I'll tell you, they can make bots that have the same twitches and random behaviours as humans, almost to perfection - for starters).
I can understand and respect comparing game features of D2 and D3 (as long as there's no rose tinted glasses or misinformed statements), or old-Bnet to new-Bnet, but comparing actual technicalities without having any specific knowledge is mindblowingly short sighted.
D2 security was bad because its a 10 years old game (as you said), and D3 doesn't have bot's and dupes? lol Online only did nothing for this game aside from the real money transactions.
D2's security was shot to shit because EVERY INSTALL had a working copy of the server software on the client's computer which was very easily reverse-engineered. It has nothing to do with the age of the game. Giving people direct access to the server software (decompiling code is a trivial speedbump) is just begging for major exploits.
Online only cannot stop bots, and I don't think anyone (including Blizzard) ever claimed that. But it has stopped dupes and it has, in part, made botting easier to deal with since Warden is always collecting information and relaying it back - I'm not sure if you remember how D2 dealt with bots, but it wasn't nearly as accurate as Warden has been... bots slipped through the cracks constantly.
18 months (hell, 2 months) into D2 and there were duped SoJs falling from the sky. People who were trying to play legit had long since stopped trading for IDd items and only traded for unIDd items since very few people actually duped them. If you think duping in D3 is remotely close to D2 then you simply know not what you speak of. Either that or you didn't play D2... or you haven't played D3. Either way it's astoundingly inaccurate. The whole Ubers event was implemented to siphon off all the duped SoJs because the D2 team had no better solution to the massive issue that dupers had created. Even Ubers barely scratched the surface because, ultimately, they were just another reason for people who were duping to dupe MORE.
The only "duping" that's occured in any significant amount in D3 has been the gold duping from the RMAH bug and the exploiting of account compromise rollback (which has since been addressed). The former was a bug, the latter was simply a policy issue that needed to be changed. Duping in D2 was exploiting client-server communication to fool the server into thinking that items dropped even though they didn't, and then creating a permenant record of those items on the server. That's a whole different world, from a technical standpoint, than a bug introduced into the RMAH.
But, since duping is so rampant in D3, how about you go and dupe me a couple near-perfect Mempos? The way you speak of it it's clearly easy and shouldn't be an issue for you to perform a couple dupes... RIGHT?
EDIT
Removed discussion of fake WoW/EQ servers. I'm not sure if that's against the rules here, but I don't want to risk going down that road.
D2 security was bad because its a 10 years old game (as you said), and D3 doesn't have bot's and dupes? lol Online only did nothing for this game aside from the real money transactions.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I never said D3 doesn't have bots, I said precisely the opposite. And no, D3 doesn't have actual dupes, as in a repeatable coding exploit/program that duplicates items.
Also, please enlighten me (if it is so easy to have that) as to why games like LoL, DotA 2, SC2, PoE, Hearthstone all opt for the same "coding standard", and don't all have a lan mode, a moddable online mode and the standard online only mode.
I'm quite curious if all these succesful modern gaming develoeprs are all wrong in their decisions...
The way I see it we have the one that cares way too much about efficiency, about which MP they can farm, about whether or not their profile is good enough for others.
So yeah, people like you and me don't fit that description (I certainly don't having been a hipster for so long), but if you check the official forums (and skill usage statistics) you will see that most people care.
You can't burst my bubble on your own this time you're gonna need at least a dozen other users to come in and say I'm wrong... because of what I've personally seen on the matter.
Now I've got lots of socketed items with tier 14 gems and am only at around 26k for each.
Some gems are special, for example, instead of just Radiant Star Emerald, there are Radiant Star Emeralds of Courage. Is that a factor?
Also, I was told you have to socket gems one at a time or something to get the best effect. I tried that on a 3-socket helmet. I have three tier 14 emeralds in a White helmet and have 634 in SDIV each. Three guys I was playing with (they didn't know each other) had about 11k for each SDIV in each item! How?
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Sol77-2972/hero/66110450
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Twoflower-2131/hero/47336841
It also kinda shows where we might be headed if they go too far with things like removing the AH/RMAH, removing the online-only requirement, and letting people freely mod their game.
It's a matter of whether or not you want a community that actually cares about where they are in relation to other players. That is good for some, bad for anothers (which can't deal with the harsh truth that they aren't the best sometimes, or even above average).
Of course some hypocrites (cough.. kr... cough... pp... cough... rn...) are gonna say that they need "x" for the game to be better, and that "y" feature ruined the game, but truth is, they just really want a game in which they can brag about their achievements with as little accessibility as possible (otherwise they have to actually compete with others to show if they are really good).
Also, DRM - which take it however you want (I'm also against it), but online only has succesfully prevented pirating of D3 and WoW (at least a good quality pirated version). So big win for them in that aspect.
The "online" part of D2 (security-wise) was so bad that people could figure out how to dupe items and make wallhacks 10+years ago. Imagine what those same people can do with today's knowledge and technology (nevermind, I'll tell you, they can make bots that have the same twitches and random behaviours as humans, almost to perfection - for starters).
I can understand and respect comparing game features of D2 and D3 (as long as there's no rose tinted glasses or misinformed statements), or old-Bnet to new-Bnet, but comparing actual technicalities without having any specific knowledge is mindblowingly short sighted.
D2's security was shot to shit because EVERY INSTALL had a working copy of the server software on the client's computer which was very easily reverse-engineered. It has nothing to do with the age of the game. Giving people direct access to the server software (decompiling code is a trivial speedbump) is just begging for major exploits.
Online only cannot stop bots, and I don't think anyone (including Blizzard) ever claimed that. But it has stopped dupes and it has, in part, made botting easier to deal with since Warden is always collecting information and relaying it back - I'm not sure if you remember how D2 dealt with bots, but it wasn't nearly as accurate as Warden has been... bots slipped through the cracks constantly.
18 months (hell, 2 months) into D2 and there were duped SoJs falling from the sky. People who were trying to play legit had long since stopped trading for IDd items and only traded for unIDd items since very few people actually duped them. If you think duping in D3 is remotely close to D2 then you simply know not what you speak of. Either that or you didn't play D2... or you haven't played D3. Either way it's astoundingly inaccurate. The whole Ubers event was implemented to siphon off all the duped SoJs because the D2 team had no better solution to the massive issue that dupers had created. Even Ubers barely scratched the surface because, ultimately, they were just another reason for people who were duping to dupe MORE.
The only "duping" that's occured in any significant amount in D3 has been the gold duping from the RMAH bug and the exploiting of account compromise rollback (which has since been addressed). The former was a bug, the latter was simply a policy issue that needed to be changed. Duping in D2 was exploiting client-server communication to fool the server into thinking that items dropped even though they didn't, and then creating a permenant record of those items on the server. That's a whole different world, from a technical standpoint, than a bug introduced into the RMAH.
But, since duping is so rampant in D3, how about you go and dupe me a couple near-perfect Mempos? The way you speak of it it's clearly easy and shouldn't be an issue for you to perform a couple dupes... RIGHT?
EDIT
Removed discussion of fake WoW/EQ servers. I'm not sure if that's against the rules here, but I don't want to risk going down that road.
Also, please enlighten me (if it is so easy to have that) as to why games like LoL, DotA 2, SC2, PoE, Hearthstone all opt for the same "coding standard", and don't all have a lan mode, a moddable online mode and the standard online only mode.
I'm quite curious if all these succesful modern gaming develoeprs are all wrong in their decisions...
The way I see it we have the one that cares way too much about efficiency, about which MP they can farm, about whether or not their profile is good enough for others.
So yeah, people like you and me don't fit that description (I certainly don't having been a hipster for so long), but if you check the official forums (and skill usage statistics) you will see that most people care.
You can't burst my bubble on your own this time you're gonna need at least a dozen other users to come in and say I'm wrong... because of what I've personally seen on the matter.