It seems like people encountering the CPU AVX issue might be screwed. Blizzard doesn’t seem to be providing any updates on the matter. When they tried fixing it before, it broke parts of the game, indicating that the game relies on it. If this is the case, Blizzard should make it clearer that AVX is required and provide everyone with this issue a refund.
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AVX can certainly be fixed, but it depends if the developpers deem it profitable.
It seems that in my opinion, Diablo 2 Ressurected player base are mostly gamers in their forties, and who don’t update their computer so often.
For my personnal situation, i’m a systems engineer who bought the best cpu i could affort 11 years ago, and who stuck with it, because it’s powerful enough to my usage, including the full 3D workflow, from modeling to texturing to rendering, at a semi-professional level, with the best up-to-date tools on the market … (zbrush, 3dsmax/maya/substance painter/vray, etc).
So no reason to buy a more recent CPU only for the AVX instruction set.
Some big AAA games which had AVX enabled on launch day, and whose deactivation were feasible and sometimes trivial : Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Cyberpunk 2077 (a simple flag to switch in the executable).
AVX is useful with anti-piracy tools, like Denuvo, but as Diablo 2 Ressurected is a 100% online game with battle.net account authentification, further protection is useless … In other words : AVX is a must have for OFFLINE games, more affected by piracy !
AVX is a “by default” compilation option, for people not wanting to make decisions, but can be disabled, every computer sciences professionnal knows that you shouldn’t NEVER ever enable any feature / library / module that isn’t STRICTLY needed by your program, for many many reasons … (it’s what i do for my day job, as a systems engineer with a focus on security and performance : bashing Hammerdin style bad developpers who don’t know sh*t what they’re doing and who have really bad work practices)
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if they do that fix they wipe bad serwer for good they know that how many ppl waiting for playing , they are use server from diablo 1 hahahahaha
I can’t blame them too much about keeping it, I mean the alpha code leak was really sad to see. That made them to focus on security.
While I agree what you said, the additional layer on security can be helpful from them to buy some time until they find a solution or becomes more beareable to remove it.
They plan this game as “live service” so, them oversecuring it can be helpful at least on first stages, when their profit are the highest and more impactful for the future of the project. While later stages they could address it, I mean d2 had a ton of bugs and issues, they’re trying to “solve” most of them and the new ones that emerged by some of their changes. The last thing they want to deal right now is about security itself or the lack of it.
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It depends what you call “security”.
AVX is not silver bullet that will make Diablo more secure, it won’t miraculously prevent botting, dupping, that kind of things.
Only flawed game logic / algorithms / design makes them possible.
For what i know (i’m not a specialist though), AVX does only help with anti-copy tools, which, in my view, is totally not needed, as Blizzard stores the games associated to each player server-side, and not client-side … (Diablo 3, World of Warcraft, Overwatch don’t need AVX for the same reason)
You don’t find Overwatch or Diablo 3 isos on warez websites because they are 100% online (games as a service, games which connect to Blizzard’s servers) and are not affected by piracy. The only solution for pirating a Blizzard “game as a service” would not be hacking the game you have on your individual computer, but hacking Blizzard’s online infrastructure, which in any way don’t give a sh*t about AVX (we’re talking servers, guys, servers don’t even use AVX, it’s not considered as a professionnal or serious security feature …)
Well, never said was silver bullet. Considering that a certain amount of in game logic was compromised and some problems hindered d2r. Was a fair assumption that they done it for this reason.
Is like an additional step for someone wanting to break their game, is about buying time. Which for them is really important right now. Sure is a thing that wouldn’t be a holy grail for them, but should avoid some headaches.
Each additional step they made to improve the security at least on the first 1-2 months would pay off in the end, that’s why folks pleased Denuvo until they anti-cheat system were broke in less than a week. Having the tool helps them to have more room to breath and often doesn’t increase the cost to use it.
Like you said, after they could consider remove it, but I would say for sure that if they didn’t removed tcp/ip and maybe this feature D2R on PC on battlenet servers would be a ghost town already.
They keeping several layers of security until they sort things out is a acceptable solution on cost/benefit wise. Like was acceptable when several companies used Denuvo in the past when had nice results at acceptable price.
EDIT:
Like ms wanting TPM 2.0 on Windows 11, by example.
TPM 2.0 is a useful feature, it’s just that i don’t see AVX being helpful in any way, concerning Diablo 2R, as far as i know. Denuvo, like you said, is a anti-piracy only helpful for OFFLINE games, that’s why big companies push so hard for “games as a service”, to get simultaneously rid of the Denuvo tax (which bites on the game editor’s profits) and to suppress game piracy, so to make more money =)
(sorry for the working i’m using, english is not my native language, when i’m talking about “game piracy”, i’m talking about people using illegal games without paying them)
so at this point im afraid to ask but does anyone have a TL;DR on what AVX actually is?
i feel like its never gonna end if i google it lol
Yes they can fix it. The Beta did not have an AVX requirement and people could play it just fine.
Adding that requirement is what broke it for some. They bought it after playing just fine in Beta and were not expecting restrictions.
Blizz already said they plan to remove it.
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Well, appears to them that are useful. If not, they wouldn’t do it, I mean wasn’t active on beta but is active on their released product. So something changed, the alpha leak didn’t helped much their lack of security so, while I agree with you I can see why they turned some security related features for it.
I mean EA use across several games, most of them are related to multiplayer games btw. Sure helps more on offline ones but they also use on several online ones, like FIFA and BF. Even if helps a bit can be useful if the cost isn’t prohibitive.
My english isn’t also my primary language either. I understand, no problem.
Is related a some features that CPU can handle. That set of instructions can be used for handle some security perks but also improving some response in certain tasks.
Yup, bought an i7 920 in December 2009. I’ve pushed everything around it to the limit, and it will still run things like Doom Eternal. The load times are a bit lengthy, but I find it tolerable.
This AVX issue is pretty unacceptable.
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Frankly, i don’t presume that Blizzard’s decision was rational or evidence-based …
In companies, a lot of decisions are made by the sales people, not the techies, despite common sense …
But it’s only speculating. To really know, one would need to see the hardware specs database that Blizzard keeps for each player (as ALL of Blizzard’s recent games are 100% online, they DO have it !), and to confirm that the non-AVX PCs represent a large or a small percentage of players, to make the decision to enable AVX, considering the non-AVX population as an “acceptable loss” or as a “necessary sacrifice”, if they do represent 5 or 10% of the player base, for an example. That would be a rational way to tackle the dilemn.
I won’t speculate on that, I don’t have that kind of data =)
PS : don’t also forget that Blizzard is in an internal turmoil, and that there’s a lot of turnover within the company. Diablo 2R is not an internal project, it’s developped by a third-party (Vicarious Visions) for easy cash. Not a lot of Blizzard’s techies are involved in this project, mostly “digital project managers” and marketers …
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I feel like this AVX issue is literally a bunch of 50+ year olds with ancient potatoes upset that they can’t play.
Buy a new processor folks…join us in 2021.
I choose not to mindlessly consoom
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Well sure, most likely was a decision on sales people to “lock” stuff up. I mean, AVX isn’t that “new” tech anyways, is a decade old tech(from 2011) on products based on 2008 proposal.
While was stated by miss cheetah, they plan to remove it. So the lock thing would be temporary.
If you consider that gpu requirement are from 2012 and cpu were from 2013, was a fair assumption of them that would have any issues about it.
First supported by Intel with the Sandy Bridge processor shipping in Q1 2011 and later on by AMD with the Bulldozer processor shipping in Q3 2011
That would mean almost any cpu from intel from 2nd gen(core i) and any fx or later arch from AMD.
Well theirs we don’t know, but If we pick Steam Survey from august 2021 and go “other details”
You get about this:
AVX - 94.70%
AVX2 - 84.09%
AVX512F - 2.89%
AVX512VNNI - 2.81%
AVX512ER - 0.00%
AVX512PF - 0.00%
That shows that only 5.30% of all hardware used in there was actually unable to use any kind of AVX. Is a really small percentile tbh.
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Update on AVX
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It’s going to be a couple more days before the fix drops. New sticky at the top.
Requesting refund. I’ll go back to playing Doom Eternal. Since my ancient CPU can’t run Diablo 2. And it’ll be a couple weeks at this point - after I’ve been accused of being below minimum specs after retail release.
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They’re having a problem because it’s not a straight AVX requirement. Intel has an instruction set emulation software, and even it cannot be used to launch the game:
It really is kind of funny that my PC can run Rainbow Six Siege, Arkham Knight, Doom, and CSGO no problem, but I can’t run D2R lol.
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