B.Net isnt just supported by Diablo's income, you have WCII and SC also contributing. ITs no where near in turmoil.
None of those games are large money makers at the present time. Look at their sales stats compared to when they first came out. They are all dwindling. Without pay-to-play subscriptions, the people who are still playing them are nothing but a drain on Blizzard because servers have to be maintained and internet costs need to be paid on a monthly basis (particularly for closed-realm games), and very little money (from slowing box-sales only) is coming in.
However, if these older games were pay-to-play, they would likely support themselves, which I guarantee is very appealing to Blizzard for D3, because they wouldn't want to make the same mistake.
Quote from "darkjay" »
Its been what?? 2 years since the last patch?
Yeah, that's exactly my point... the game is showing it's age. With less and less sales, they are slowing down product improvements. Why should they focus on an 8 year old game? Do you honestly think that if they make enough patches, it will regain it's popularity and there will be a surge of new purchases? Of course not. D2 is old news, and they have moved on to bigger and newer things.
Quote from "darkjay" »
I was talking about player support. The only way to get support for diablo is in forums of the FAQ page that doesnt do anything.
WoW has people that answer phones...
People answering phones has nothing to do with the fact that WoW is P2P. They answer phones because WoW is Blizzard's flagship product and is most popular by far at the moment. They want to do everything practically possible to ensure customer loyalty to the customer and to the Warcraft franchise.
D2 never had this level of support because I don't believe this was economically feasible for Blizzard at that time. Now that they have a number of very successful products under their belt, their company is large enough to be able to support the customers in this way. Therefore, I guarantee that D2 (if it is ever released) will have a similar level of customer support regardless of it's type (MMO or not).
I think when you BO, it should not automatically fill your life orb. It should be like it was before in 1.09 so when you get BO'ed you see your life orb go down so you know how much extra life was just added.
Also, a noob should not be able to BO over a high BO. The highest should stay. This same idea already works well with all paladin auras and enchant. Only the highest one is used.
When d2 came out it was nearly as popular as WoW but yet it didnt have good support.
When it first came out, yes it did. Blizzard's sole attention was focused on it.
Quote from "darkjay" »
The only reason WoW gets so many patches/support is because its P2P
Exactly. It's a constant source of money.
Quote from "darkjay" »
Huh?? no one buys d2 any more??
It's an 8 year old game. Box sales are going down. Since box sales are the ONLY source of money for D2, blizzard doesn't make any money off of the hundreds of thousands of players who still play D2 (not all at once, obviously, but it still costs money to keep those servers active).
Quote from "darkjay" »
It never did have good support.
There were several patches for it, as well as countless minor server-side (behind-the-scenes) tweaks and updates for it when it was still a hot game. What other kind of "support" are you talking about?
But what you seem to don't understand is that servers not only track the position of each player, it also handles interaction between them, and because these zones can host many players at the same time, not only 8, it requires more powerful servers. The interaction between 8 players in 10 different games is not as complex as the interaction between 80 players.
But it's NOT a complicated interaction. Each client does NOT track the information of every other client. If it happened that way, the ammount of bandwidth necessary would scale at a geometric factor as Blades11 showed in this graph because every player's computer would have to transmit it's information to every other:
Quote from "Blades11" »
That's not what happens. 1st of all, all playable areas are split into zones. If a player is in a zone, all players outside of his zone are completely ignored. Okay, but suppose 100 players decide to meet in one zone...
Whenever any player walks, runs, hits, talks, sits, stands, or does ANYTHING, his command is NOT carried out on his computer. It is FIRST sent to the zone server. Then the zone server sends that information to EACH player, INCLUDING the player who issued the command. ONLY then, does the action occur (and it occurs on everyone's computer at the same time). This is to prevent you being able to walk around and do these actions without communicating with the zone server.
So at any given time, each player's computer is doing ONLY 2 things:
Uploading a command to the zone server (not actually DOING the command, but basically asking permission from the server to do it)
Several times per second: downloading a stream from the server that includes ALL the actions that you AND every other player have done since the last stream, so your computer can update YOUR character (make him do the action you asked the server), and everybody else's characters (making them move around the screen, or whatever).
It does not matter significantly how many players actions are in the download stream because it's ONLY a very small amount of text data for each one (probably encrypted), like Player1-move to location X,Y,Z; face 45-degrees north, etc.
So if you are the only player in the zone, it might be like a 20-byte stream that you have to download from the server several times a second. If there are 100 people in your zone, the file will only be 2 kilobytes. It's SUCH small data, that it really doesn't add a significant impact. It takes longer to establish the packet stream transfer than it does to transmit the data.
So yes, TECHNICALLY, if you cram 1000 people in one zone, it WILL cause more lag, than a non-MMO game where there are only 8 people in each "zone" (it's not really called a zone in this case, but its the same thing). But under normal circumstances, this is not the case. And, if for any reason this DOES become the case, Blizzard would just have to split up the heavily-used zones, making them smaller.
For some reason blizzard has found a way to offer free internet gameplay with diablo sc and wc. No one is quite sure how they have managed it, or how it works out but it does. Ever since it was started it has worked out. The money to run the servers comes from their sales.
WoW is the only exception to this. But then again WoW has 2 expansions, almost, and has a huge support team, where as the other three games have hardly nothing at all for a support team.
Yes, you are correct, the other games have very little support staff, very infrequent patches and updates, and in general, very little care from Blizzard. That's because:
WoW is most popular
WoW is pay-to-play
WoW is the money maker
D2 is a money DRAIN on Blizzard. People have stopped buying the boxes in large numbers, and now they are stuck supporting D2 servers without getting any money for it. That's why it's a low priority, and that's why they don't give any support on it.
If they would have though about implementing a pay-to-play subscription scheme way back in year 2000, they wouldn't be stuck in the pickle they are in now.
I bet they are VERY tempted not to repeat the same mistake for D3. They will make it pay-to-play if they think they can get away with it. But there is no precedent for doing so with a non-MMO. Their fear of being called "greedy", etc will be the only thing preventing them from making it pay-to-play.
If you host separate games, you can run those on multiple servers, just as much as you want. There's no interaction between these servers, as each game is separated from the others, and they just have to communicate with the main server which lists created games, and that's all.
&
Quote from "Blades11" »
WoW costs more because instead of adding 8+8+8 etc etc in D2 you add x+x+x which is the number of people in each server also you must add in the bandwidth for everyone seeing each other and multiple servers and instances
In WoW, even though you are in the world with everyone else, information about each player is NOT transmitted to every other player. Only players in your specific area are seen by you. The game server has to track each player. Not each client. But that's the same in D2 as well--the game server STILL has to track each player, even though they are in different instances.
The only difference is that the clients in D2 only see 7 other people, and the clients in WoW can see many more people. HOWEVER, seeing as you are not around hundreds of people all the time (especially when your fighting), it won't add too significantly to the bandwidth of each client.
But anyway, we are talking about the bandwidth requirements of the SERVERS, not the clients. The SERVERS have to track the positions of every player ANYWAY, whether they are in the same game, or in separate instances. So it doesn't matter.
Quote from "Blades11" »
the number of total people playing could be the same but the bandwidth requirement for WoW will always be higher because of it's graphics and style of gameplay where everyone can see each other and the computer has to process what each of those players is doing instead of just 8.
Diablo 3 could have better graphics which would cancel that amount of bandwidth but the fact that you can see more people creates more bandwidth because the amount of processes is greatly increased for each player on the server it is an exponential function the more players the faster more bandwidth is needed.
Graphics does not matter. In terms of bandwidth, it literally doesn't matter whether you are playing with stick figures or 3D models. Everything you see on your screen is rendered locally. You may indeed get a slow-down when you see a lot of detailed graphics at once, but it's not lag due to bandwidth. It's due to your own computer's local rendering of the scene.
Let me explain it this way: When people move their character around the screen, the only information that is sent to the server is coordinate information (like "player1, move left. sit down. stand up. face north. swing weapon. etc, etc"). That's all that is sent. It's not much data... they don't have to send highly detailed graphics or model information.
So their are orcs and elfs in diablo???
...
Diablo plays off of the lack of people in each game, gives a sence of hopeless. Try to solo WoW once and then solo Diablo, you will find its a bit easier.
WoW has 2 playable factions, diablo has one playable faction.
I am speaking from a technical point of view. The games themselves can be completely different, but the hardware and bandwidth costs are analogous, assuming they have the same numbers of players.
Quote from "darkjay" »
The key word in MMO is MASSIVE, one could argue that the diablo world is massive but MMO refers to players you can only have 8 people in a game... not very massive compared those of a WoW server
Think of it this way:
A closed-realm game like D2 has many instances, each with a small number of players
A MMO like WoW has a single instance with many players.
Assuming a closed-realm instanced game and a MMO have the same number of total players, it doesn't matter whether they are in one large world, or split up over thousands of instanced worlds. You STILL have the same number of players, and they will BOTH have roughly the same bandwidth and hardware requirements.
Quote from "darkjay" »
WoW servers do infact to more $ to operate than those of Diablo 2 per say, the reason being WoW has 600+ servers compared to 150 of Diablo
As I said in my firs post, WoW is a newer game, and therefore has more players than D2. They have taken down D2 servers and added WoW servers because there are more WoW players. My argument is if each game had the same number of players, they would require about the same bandwidth/server cost. Therefore, it's likely D3 will be pay-to-play. People cannot keep thinking that a game will never be pay-to-play unless it's an MMO--because it still costs a lot of money and constant maintenance to keep closed-realm games running, even if they are not MMO.
You don't know what you're talking about. Why don't you do us all a favor and demonstrate exactly why you believe the hardware, maintenance, or bandwidth costs for a MMO would be higher than the same number of people playing on a closed-realm non-MMO.
sounds about right to me, but dont we create our own servers on d2 also? b/c i hear ppl talkin about a shitty host all the time
Only in open, you create your own server. On closed realms, the game is hosted entirely by Blizzard. They need entire rooms full of server computers to handle loads like this with no lag, not to mention probably like 50 T1 internet connections.
i haven't heard of non-mmo's being p2play, care to list some for me?
Quote from "LarryNC" »
Too bad Diablo III will not be MMO - No monthly fee anyway
Quote from "LarryNC" »
Oh yeah, just to get this out: Diablo III and Starcraft II won't have monthly fees, unless they are MMOs, because MMOs are what takes a ton of maintenance, but hey, if they do get monthly fees - thats gonna be some kick ass customer service, high quality servers and patches!
Some of you don't understand the technical differences between a MMO and a closed-realm online RPG. None. There is no difference.
For some reason you all think that a MMO is so much "harder" to host than a closed-realm, and that's why they charge pay-to-play. It's not harder.
First Person Shooters and "open" (non-realmed) online games will never* require pay-to-play because the game company does not need to host each game. Servers are created by individual people, and the ONLY thing the game company needs it to TRACK each server and provide a master list.
But with a closed-realm game (even a non-MMO like D2), the game company STILL needs to own, maintain, and operate hundreds of server computers, not to mention MASSIVE bandwidth costs to allow hundreds of thousands of people to play online at the same time... EVEN if they are instanced games, the game company still needs to host them.
Bottom line... D3 could very well be pay-to-play because the costs of operating a closed realm are the same as the costs of operating an MMO. The only difference between D2 and WoW is that WoW is newer and has way more people, and because it's pay-to-play, its a huge cash-cow for Blizzard. Therefore Blizzard is focusing most of their resources on WoW. Don't think for a second that they wouldn't have considered making D2 a pay-to-play, but that was unheard of seven years ago when D2 was released.
* Exception is Halo 2 for the PC. That's because they charge a service fee for connecting to the XBOX Live system, so you can play with XBOX players. It's a huge greedy rip-off, and nobody will buy Halo 2 because nobody is that stupid.
You forgot to add an option for avid fanboys that will pay over 15 a month for a new Diablo title.
Too bad Diablo III will not be MMO - No monthly fee anyway, but this should be interesting. Weeee!
I chose "No" because - I would prefer to not to pay a monthly fee for anything, even cable, and internet! - but hey, if it's that goog, I just may pay 19.99 a month for awesome Diablo III!
LarryNC, there's no rule that says "only MMOs can charge a subscription fee". I don't know where you get this idea. The company will charge whatever they think people will pay for it. So answer the question. WOULD you pay a monthly fee for D3, even if it was not a MMO? Yes or no.
If we had that people would make chars just to get the rewards, much rushing and dumping.
Not necesarly,
The rewards could be like experience or something. Since there will be 15 acts we won't be doing the same ancients 3 times, so we will need quests to provide experience as a reward.
Also, maybe one of these quests will be the ability to hire a merc. You can't trade a reward like that.
Or have the same reward, but just a different quest for each char class, just to switch it up a bit
0
None of those games are large money makers at the present time. Look at their sales stats compared to when they first came out. They are all dwindling. Without pay-to-play subscriptions, the people who are still playing them are nothing but a drain on Blizzard because servers have to be maintained and internet costs need to be paid on a monthly basis (particularly for closed-realm games), and very little money (from slowing box-sales only) is coming in.
However, if these older games were pay-to-play, they would likely support themselves, which I guarantee is very appealing to Blizzard for D3, because they wouldn't want to make the same mistake.
Yeah, that's exactly my point... the game is showing it's age. With less and less sales, they are slowing down product improvements. Why should they focus on an 8 year old game? Do you honestly think that if they make enough patches, it will regain it's popularity and there will be a surge of new purchases? Of course not. D2 is old news, and they have moved on to bigger and newer things.
People answering phones has nothing to do with the fact that WoW is P2P. They answer phones because WoW is Blizzard's flagship product and is most popular by far at the moment. They want to do everything practically possible to ensure customer loyalty to the customer and to the Warcraft franchise.
D2 never had this level of support because I don't believe this was economically feasible for Blizzard at that time. Now that they have a number of very successful products under their belt, their company is large enough to be able to support the customers in this way. Therefore, I guarantee that D2 (if it is ever released) will have a similar level of customer support regardless of it's type (MMO or not).
0
Also, a noob should not be able to BO over a high BO. The highest should stay. This same idea already works well with all paladin auras and enchant. Only the highest one is used.
0
When it first came out, yes it did. Blizzard's sole attention was focused on it.
Exactly. It's a constant source of money.
It's an 8 year old game. Box sales are going down. Since box sales are the ONLY source of money for D2, blizzard doesn't make any money off of the hundreds of thousands of players who still play D2 (not all at once, obviously, but it still costs money to keep those servers active).
There were several patches for it, as well as countless minor server-side (behind-the-scenes) tweaks and updates for it when it was still a hot game. What other kind of "support" are you talking about?
0
And why can't you understand that one single D2 server handles a lot more than 8 players? You just pwned your whole argument.
0
But it's NOT a complicated interaction. Each client does NOT track the information of every other client. If it happened that way, the ammount of bandwidth necessary would scale at a geometric factor as Blades11 showed in this graph because every player's computer would have to transmit it's information to every other:
That's not what happens. 1st of all, all playable areas are split into zones. If a player is in a zone, all players outside of his zone are completely ignored. Okay, but suppose 100 players decide to meet in one zone...
Whenever any player walks, runs, hits, talks, sits, stands, or does ANYTHING, his command is NOT carried out on his computer. It is FIRST sent to the zone server. Then the zone server sends that information to EACH player, INCLUDING the player who issued the command. ONLY then, does the action occur (and it occurs on everyone's computer at the same time). This is to prevent you being able to walk around and do these actions without communicating with the zone server.
So at any given time, each player's computer is doing ONLY 2 things:
- Uploading a command to the zone server (not actually DOING the command, but basically asking permission from the server to do it)
- Several times per second: downloading a stream from the server that includes ALL the actions that you AND every other player have done since the last stream, so your computer can update YOUR character (make him do the action you asked the server), and everybody else's characters (making them move around the screen, or whatever).
It does not matter significantly how many players actions are in the download stream because it's ONLY a very small amount of text data for each one (probably encrypted), like Player1-move to location X,Y,Z; face 45-degrees north, etc.So if you are the only player in the zone, it might be like a 20-byte stream that you have to download from the server several times a second. If there are 100 people in your zone, the file will only be 2 kilobytes. It's SUCH small data, that it really doesn't add a significant impact. It takes longer to establish the packet stream transfer than it does to transmit the data.
So yes, TECHNICALLY, if you cram 1000 people in one zone, it WILL cause more lag, than a non-MMO game where there are only 8 people in each "zone" (it's not really called a zone in this case, but its the same thing). But under normal circumstances, this is not the case. And, if for any reason this DOES become the case, Blizzard would just have to split up the heavily-used zones, making them smaller.
0
Yes, you are correct, the other games have very little support staff, very infrequent patches and updates, and in general, very little care from Blizzard. That's because:
D2 is a money DRAIN on Blizzard. People have stopped buying the boxes in large numbers, and now they are stuck supporting D2 servers without getting any money for it. That's why it's a low priority, and that's why they don't give any support on it.
If they would have though about implementing a pay-to-play subscription scheme way back in year 2000, they wouldn't be stuck in the pickle they are in now.
I bet they are VERY tempted not to repeat the same mistake for D3. They will make it pay-to-play if they think they can get away with it. But there is no precedent for doing so with a non-MMO. Their fear of being called "greedy", etc will be the only thing preventing them from making it pay-to-play.
0
In WoW, even though you are in the world with everyone else, information about each player is NOT transmitted to every other player. Only players in your specific area are seen by you. The game server has to track each player. Not each client. But that's the same in D2 as well--the game server STILL has to track each player, even though they are in different instances.
The only difference is that the clients in D2 only see 7 other people, and the clients in WoW can see many more people. HOWEVER, seeing as you are not around hundreds of people all the time (especially when your fighting), it won't add too significantly to the bandwidth of each client.
But anyway, we are talking about the bandwidth requirements of the SERVERS, not the clients. The SERVERS have to track the positions of every player ANYWAY, whether they are in the same game, or in separate instances. So it doesn't matter.
Graphics does not matter. In terms of bandwidth, it literally doesn't matter whether you are playing with stick figures or 3D models. Everything you see on your screen is rendered locally. You may indeed get a slow-down when you see a lot of detailed graphics at once, but it's not lag due to bandwidth. It's due to your own computer's local rendering of the scene.
Let me explain it this way: When people move their character around the screen, the only information that is sent to the server is coordinate information (like "player1, move left. sit down. stand up. face north. swing weapon. etc, etc"). That's all that is sent. It's not much data... they don't have to send highly detailed graphics or model information.
0
I am speaking from a technical point of view. The games themselves can be completely different, but the hardware and bandwidth costs are analogous, assuming they have the same numbers of players.
Think of it this way:
- A closed-realm game like D2 has many instances, each with a small number of players
- A MMO like WoW has a single instance with many players.
Assuming a closed-realm instanced game and a MMO have the same number of total players, it doesn't matter whether they are in one large world, or split up over thousands of instanced worlds. You STILL have the same number of players, and they will BOTH have roughly the same bandwidth and hardware requirements.As I said in my firs post, WoW is a newer game, and therefore has more players than D2. They have taken down D2 servers and added WoW servers because there are more WoW players. My argument is if each game had the same number of players, they would require about the same bandwidth/server cost. Therefore, it's likely D3 will be pay-to-play. People cannot keep thinking that a game will never be pay-to-play unless it's an MMO--because it still costs a lot of money and constant maintenance to keep closed-realm games running, even if they are not MMO.
0
0
Only in open, you create your own server. On closed realms, the game is hosted entirely by Blizzard. They need entire rooms full of server computers to handle loads like this with no lag, not to mention probably like 50 T1 internet connections.
0
Some of you don't understand the technical differences between a MMO and a closed-realm online RPG. None. There is no difference.
For some reason you all think that a MMO is so much "harder" to host than a closed-realm, and that's why they charge pay-to-play. It's not harder.
First Person Shooters and "open" (non-realmed) online games will never* require pay-to-play because the game company does not need to host each game. Servers are created by individual people, and the ONLY thing the game company needs it to TRACK each server and provide a master list.
But with a closed-realm game (even a non-MMO like D2), the game company STILL needs to own, maintain, and operate hundreds of server computers, not to mention MASSIVE bandwidth costs to allow hundreds of thousands of people to play online at the same time... EVEN if they are instanced games, the game company still needs to host them.
Bottom line... D3 could very well be pay-to-play because the costs of operating a closed realm are the same as the costs of operating an MMO. The only difference between D2 and WoW is that WoW is newer and has way more people, and because it's pay-to-play, its a huge cash-cow for Blizzard. Therefore Blizzard is focusing most of their resources on WoW. Don't think for a second that they wouldn't have considered making D2 a pay-to-play, but that was unheard of seven years ago when D2 was released.
* Exception is Halo 2 for the PC. That's because they charge a service fee for connecting to the XBOX Live system, so you can play with XBOX players. It's a huge greedy rip-off, and nobody will buy Halo 2 because nobody is that stupid.
0
LarryNC, there's no rule that says "only MMOs can charge a subscription fee". I don't know where you get this idea. The company will charge whatever they think people will pay for it. So answer the question. WOULD you pay a monthly fee for D3, even if it was not a MMO? Yes or no.
0
http://dresdrum.ytmnd.com/
Any others?
0
From the screen that u make the characters on, it looks like the sorc might be black, but when u playing her in the game she looks white.
idc whichever, shes definitly hotter than the rolley-poley fat ass zon with ass bulges
0
Not necesarly,
The rewards could be like experience or something. Since there will be 15 acts we won't be doing the same ancients 3 times, so we will need quests to provide experience as a reward.
Also, maybe one of these quests will be the ability to hire a merc. You can't trade a reward like that.
Or have the same reward, but just a different quest for each char class, just to switch it up a bit