The Possible Ramifications are Frightening

Sometimes the deeper meaning of an event escapes us. Things that we would like to think we would have noticed immediately don’t catch our attention until sometime later. Talking about Diablo 3 there are some ramifications that occur that I personally hadn’t considered but are never the less somewhat frightening to consider.

For example the fact that you are required to log into Battle.net to play has some obvious ramifications such as not having internet access means that you can’t play the game, even the single player parts. I’ve already spoken out about this so I won’t ramble on about it again, however I do think people need to think about just what that means. Another possible ramification though just occurred to me last night, specifically that getting banned from battle.net would result in having a game you are unable to play.

I believe the logic behind this is to combat piracy, secure the online auction house, and perhaps to better monitor game play and the experience… i.e. prevent cheating, help find bugs and glitches, etc. However the fact that you could be banned from a game that you spend money on … that some what disturbs me. Again this isn’t like WoW in that with World of Warcraft there are certain exceptions knowing that it is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying game (MMORPG). MMORPGs are very server centric due to the nature of thousands of players playing together in a world.

However the same can’t be said for Diablo. When I think of the Diablo franchise I don’t think MMORPG, I think RPG (Role Playing Game). It has a great storyline, but I’ll be honest for me Diablo has never been about the multi-player it has been about my hero against the forces of the prime evils and the story line there in. I don’t expect 300 or more additional people all to be fighting the prime evils, or be trying to assist me, and knowing what that would mean to the story… I wouldn’t want it.

So now little “anti-social” me has to log on to a server to play a single player game and be watched like a hawk by some piece of software. I don’t plan on exploiting any bugs, I don’t plan on working the system, in fact I don’t even plan on making money at the AH. Instead I just want to play the game and enjoy the experience… but due to the nature of games I could accidently find a bug that testing didn’t reveal (believe me it’s happened before, like falling though the world in Star Wars Galaxies…). Depending on how that is interpreted I could, in theory, be banned, unable to play even the solo game play. Its something to think about.

Update:  For some reason the HTML when I updated it was off, so I had to re-upload and edit the post.