Ian Noble
5/19/2012 1:07:00 PM
On Fri, 18 May 2012 13:03:34 -0700 (PDT), Warulak <warulak@gmail.com>
wrote:
>> I'm playing in europe and I played a LOT... so much in fact that I think I
>> played at least 12-14h each day last 3 days, I finished the whole game on my
>> barbarian on normal and now I'm playing witch doctor on normal and I'm done
>> half way and the ONLY time I was unable to play was from midnight to 1 am on
>> launch day. There was once a realm restart and that is it was over in 2 min.
>
>The American servers were hit alot harder. 5-6 hours at a time of down time.
>
>Still a single player game should not be reliant on network servers.
You're not playing a single-player game. There is no single-player
mode in D3; it just feels like it. What you call a single-player game
is actually a (semi-private) four-player game in which it happens that
you're (currently) the only player.
I say "currently", and only "semi-private", because, at any minute,
anyone on your friends list can decide join what you thought was
"your" game. They don't need permission or a password; they can click
a button marked "Fast join".
Whether I like *that* is another matter - frankly, I think it's
abysmal, and the sooner that Blizzard understand that people need to
be able to play in private occasionally, and implement an invisibility
mode, the better - but right now, it happens to be the case.
To be able to do what you and others seem to be asking, Blizzard would
have had to develop either:
- a single-player, full verion of the game that could run stand-alone
alongside the server version. That's bug-prone and expensive, and of
no obvious benefit to Blizzard - so not going to happen.
or:
- a near-serverless architecture in which the full game runs on, and
only on, everyone's machines (look at D2). That's hack-and dup-prone
(look at D2). Ignoring other considerations, that's in particular an
incredibly bad design if you want, say, to provide an auction-house
that people can use and trust - let alone one where you can actually
sell that incredibly rare drop for real money (so, again, not going to
happen).
Central servers have other benefits; they offload compute cyclesgame
cycles, mean that quite a lot of game bugs can be fix transparently,
without needing to roll out a patch, and make the game effectively
unstealable. Personally I don't see any of those things as downsides.
If there's one *big* problem in my book, it's that they also guarantee
a limited life - because once Blizzard decide to pull the plug on the
game, that's it - and I have no control over or input to when that may
be.
The other, more obvious down side is that, yes, when the servers are
having problems, or being maitained, or your internet connection is
down, you can't play. But frankly, that's such a small portion of the
time that I can live with it.
Cheers - Ian