If I wanted to further their causes, I would finance some medical studies. A thing that has long-lasting results that help EVERYONE. I wouldn’t just give money to feed some orphaned kids or heal sick people for free.
If I really wanted to help a specific person in need - I would find how that person could be made to have a suitable job that pays. Re-education programs with an obligation to work for me, to return my investment, and things like that.
Free money? Personal help to people in need? I have no belief in such things. They may help a person, but it’s a waste as far as humankind is concerned.
I’m all for teaching people how to fish rather than giving them fish for free. And SO many charities are just about wasting money on useless kinds of kindness - like giving free food to homeless that does NOTHING to improve their situation or make those homeless any useful to society.
In my opinion it is better to take one homeless man who wants to change his life, give him some specialized education and a job. On a condition that he pays you back from his earnings every month until you’re square. THIS helps. This is not altruistic, but it’s fair. This is better than feeding a thousand homeless people one meal and never asking anything in return.
The thing that always struck me as insane about the story - is that he is named to be greedy by the author. And then the entire narration is weaven around that idea, as well as the idea of morality (or author’s definition of it at least). And the set up is that Scrooge causes a lot of suffering to other people by doing nothing in particular, while he could share his wealth and make those people to be happy.
And this is just insane.
It’s one of those stories where once you see that the author has an agenda and a message - it loses all the magic. You start noticing how every situation is custom-made to make Scrooge look the worst, and his ideas to look bad. It’s a prime example of how slander and defamation works - where all the worst is inflated and everything else is ignored entirely.
In reality, he was fully justified in his lifestyle, and the change of heart that he had only generated a few bottom-feeders who would probably do nothing useful in their lives but live happily relying on the old man’s patronage. And then probably get completely undeserved mentions in his Last Will. And THEN, once he dies and his money get spent in a few years - they will return to their poverty having learned nothing and achieved nothing.
You implied hardcore was the intended way to play.
Obviously lag and disconnects aren’t ideal… but most of those incidents are the player’s connection rather than Blizzard’s. To date, I have almost never lagged (and had plenty of notice/warning of it to get out of hardcore if I was playing that - it only required logging in and checking the connection displayed on-screen) and only been outright disconnected once.
You can always impose hardcore on yourself anyway. You die, delete your character. In D3, anyway. No telling what carries over in D4 yet…
If it is done right you can appeal to the majority of your targeted audience without too much trouble. I think that they can do just that if they do it right. Make too many mistakes this time and you screw the pooch again and it might make it harder to sell the next iteration in the Diablo universe.
People that cannot manage the cost of internet would be at a huge disadvantage as far as the way this country is. Internet is a utility like water, electric, etc…
In the PC version of D3 there would be new types of cheaters and pirated servers if offline mode exist for D3 and even D4 would have it as well.
Protecting their IP and game integrity is more important than giving an offline mode that would go counter to doing those things.
Then you live by the following motto. Feed a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime
Or maybe more appropriate these days; feed a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you kill of the fish stock and everyone starve.
It still seems hard to conclude that would be the outcome.
Judging from WoW, offline mode is hardly necessary for private servers.
MUCH bigger, hence more interest, hence more people willing to put time into emulation.
Had a partial server code and database leak in the first days after launch.
Took over 10 years to get pirate servers to anywhere resembling the original. And even then they weren’t perfect.
and they STILL only have Vanilla working well-enough, and TBC and WOTLK semi-working. Everything else exists, but barely playable.
TLDR, if you think that making a working emulator is easy - it’s not. And getting that emulator to be close enough to the original is even harder, especially if you don’t have the data on hand. And with diablo - you really don’t.
I won’t say no one will bother for diablo, because they will. But it’ll be years and years before it’s any good at all, and it’ll never reach a state of being almost indistinguishable.
And having a bad and outdated pirate server several years after release does very little to undermine sales.
Ultimately you’ll never be able to completely avert things that may disrupt your gameplay.
Even if the game were offline you could still lose power, or get some error, or your computer/monitor could shut down, or a family member or friend interrupts you at a crucial moment. You’ll always have risks. Online mode might be another small risk added to the pile, but so what?
i like the idea of separate licenses. it increases separation between online and offline. makes drm easier. blizz will sell more copies. all they have to do, is like copy paste D4 code into different games.
so everyone is happy, and blizz wins ,$$$
Sure. No DCs certainly is a major risk removed though. Much more likely than a power loss.
But actually, online mode which detected your DC, paused and stored the game until you got back, could save you both from DCs, and power losses (not from your monnitor dying though :D)
There are no solutions to cats on keyboards. Well, there are solutions, but people find them evil for some reason.