As predicted…

I’ve spoken out against the idea of games with an “always on” strategy for preventing piracy.  The idea, for anyone who doesn’t know, is that you MUST BE ONLINE AT ALL TIMES in order to play the game even the single player part of the game.  By doing this you are signed into your account with the game company and they can monitor and verify that you are who you say you are and are playing a legal copy of their game.

An article in today’s Kotaku provides an interesting, and might I add, complementary view of my own view points.  In essence this takes away your ability to play the game at your leisure… you are playing the game because THEY LET YOU play the game.  Not only that but you are constantly burning data which for anyone with Comcast is an issue (remember that 250 GB monthly data cap folks!).  In addition to THAT what happens when they take the servers down after lets say five, or ten years?  You’ve paid good money for a game that you can no longer play even though it has a single player mode.

Now I’m sure there are plenty of people out there already saying “QQ (Quit Crying, for those out of the loop, said because QQ looks like two eyes with tears coming out of them), you paid for the game and got your time out of it.  Besides you have to buy MMOs and they eventually get shut off!”  My point however is that there is a distinct difference between an MMO which by its name alone indicates “Massively Multiplayer”  i.e. you MUST PLAY THIS GAME WITH OTHER PEOPLE vs. a game like Diablo in which playing with other people is optional.

True the new auction house feature requires internet connection, but why couldn’t they just set that up as: 

• An optional feature you can turn off or on
• A feature that connects to the internet only so long as you are using it
• Use an online interface, such as a secured HTML browser built into the game, which is I admit, similar to the first and second options

Remember folks for anyone who is complaining about not being able to play this is TYPICAL OF A LARGE SCALE GAME LAUNCH.  I’ve never seen and never EXPECT TO SEE a game launch with out a hitch any more… after all that’s what Day 1 patches are for.  Any game that requires you to connect to a server just to register the game to play it is going to have the problem or not enough server space to log everyone in at once.  This however goes beyond that by removing your ability to play even once your game is registered.  Its your money and this is what you voted for with every dollar you’ve spent… sadly I admit I didn’t do my research here as I thought Blizzard was above and beyond the “always on” connection phenomenon.  I know I’ll think twice before I buy a Blizzard product after this, and if I do, it almost certainly won’t be on launch day, or in the first several weeks of launch.