Suggestion : Make full offline mode and allow modders to save this ship

General Discussion
83

It’s also fine for the players who don’t want it to hammer home that point as much as possible, but we keep getting told to “shut up Blizzard already said no” as though Blizzard apparently never changes their mind or something.

We’ve already been though the whole cheating thing and all you can do is spout vague nonsense about an “offline core” despite admitting you know basically nothing about software engineering while dismissing anything that doesn’t agree with your preconception.

Diablo 2 already managed to have an offline mode that did not add to cheating in the online modes.

It worked just fine in Diablo 2. The people who wont ever play online aren’t the kind of people who will buy an always online Diablo 4 anyway.

So you’re just losing those players, not forcing them into online play.

The list was purely for the purposes of talking about piracy.

Cheating exists in every game. It’s just that nobody in their right mind gives a damn if somebody cheats in their singleplayer Minecraft game.

And here we go with the strawman argument because you don’t have an actual answer to my point so you go with an insane hyperbole that I wasn’t even arguing for.

Offline mode isn’t absolutely vital

but it does offer more value to the customer and taking it away arguably adds no value to the customer either.

There’s nothing wrong with a customer trying to get the best value for their money rather than making excuses for the business. That’s how the free market is supposed to work.

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84

D3 is over 8 years old now where the PC version doesn’t have offline mode. Do you really think that you and the others that agree with you have the power to force them to put it in. Also do you really think that you should even if you had such power. Threads like this have been coming up for the entire lifetime of the game.

You know you are right, software programs have no cores at all. They don’t have a foundation that is etched in stone. There are no rules when making software either. It is all haphazard and chaotic. When you have a program that works it is all due to happy accidents that all come together to make the program work, right.

Oh and I couldn’t learn it from others that have explained it here like naksiloth. What he said makes a lot of sense. It makes sense for software to have a core, a foundation that all other things are based on. Those things would be etched in stone. Without rules chaos would reign supreme and you know it.

Oh and D2 online portion has superior competition to D3. Hmm, D2 ladders are fixed. If I were to be able to play D2 on the ladder. Then let’s say that I start playing the ladder with a Paladin and use a Hammerdin. If I play along with seven others and we help each other to get to the top of the ladder by playing together long enough to get to level 99 first.

Now tell me how in hell is anyone gonna knock me off of the top of the ladder if I am the first to level 99. That cannot happen in D2. In D3’s leader boards it can happen. So no bots or any other cheats will change the ladder at all.

PvP is another interesting area. If you cheat in PvP you are likely to get caught then you will not be allowed to play with others. And what do you get if you were to cheat a bunch of ears. Knowing that you got them from cheating isn’t gonna be a big bragging rights.

Can you prove beyond all shadow of doubt that those that played D2 offline didn’t buy D3, since this thread is about D3 anyway. I can say you are wrong there because I only played very limited online. Only to see if I ever could play it online. I can tell you that I have tried different servers, different internet connections and different PC. I wasn’t able to play D2 online at all. The lag made it unplayable.

So you are gonna start deflecting other issues. Thinking that piracy is the only reason. Well you would be wrong there.

Competition does have a factor in cheating in an online game. That is even true for those that support offline mode.

So a game without any competition means there is no reason to cheat in the online portion of that game. You are risking your account.

You do know that you wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not a games supports offline mode if it is entirely offline. Where it is offline only, although I wonder how many players would love it to happen that way.

Now add that to the fact that Blizz has said that the PC version of this game will not get offline mode. Then you know what would be the best course of action.

So you get the best value for your money by forcing a company to do what they don’t want to do. I don’t see how that will help you. All that does, if you had such power, is to lower the moral of the employees. They won’t be happy knowing that they have no power to be able to put their foot down and say no to you. So that means that their work (productivity) will suffer. So the quality of the game might suffer as well.

Now if offline mode adds value to you. You might lose it in the quality of the game. Not a good trade if you ask me.

85

Nobody is forcing Blizzard to do anything.

Ah yes the old “hyperbole because I have no real argument” comes up yet again, because obviously if I’ve been trying to tell you that games don’t have a specifically offline or online core that must mean that they have no cores at all.

Do you know what makes a whole lot of sense? Making it so that the entire game can run on the PC in offline mode but only part of it runs on the PC in the online mode.

It’s almost as if…different game modes can use different code, but I’m sure you’ll try to act like I’m saying that they need to code 2 games again because apparently it’s also impossible to re-use code that you’ve already written.

Naksiloth also admitted to knowing nothing about software engineering beyond “having talked to some people about it”.

I said that offline mode didn’t add any cheats that wouldn’t be there even if the offline mode was removed from the game, not which game has superior competitive aspects.

Again not exactly what I said, but whatever.

but if we’re gonna pull the “Can you prove your claims?” card, you can’t do it either.

I also mentioned the other points.

Not every single word I type is about every single thing. That part of my post was about piracy.

Competition can influence it, but I think you’re underestimating the drive for people to shortcut progression, or to simply just grief other players.

Plus the best way to combat cheating is for Blizzard to be proactive about banning cheaters, because the reality is that every game has exploits that can be used to cheat.

Diablo 4 will have them too regardless of if they have offline or not. Nobody in this world writes flawless code that’s more complex than Hello World.

I’m also not and never have been arguing for every game ever to be offline only.

It’s a stupid hyperbole and we both know it. You’re only doing it to deflect from the fact you’re not capable of arguing what I’m actually saying.

There’s that forcing word again. Am I going to Blizzard’s headquarters and holding a gun to J Allen Brack’s head until he commands that the company do what I want?

Blizzard can do whatever they want. I wont even sit here and threaten that if they don’t do everything I want I wont buy their next game, but neither will I automatically just buy the game if I don’t think it offers enough value.

I’m just advocating for what will give me the best value for the money that Blizzard is hoping I will spend on Diablo 4(even though this is a Diablo 3 thread, that ship has sort of sailed. I doubt enough people are even working on the game to be able to make that change).

and I didn’t buy Diablo 3 since I got it from the WoW annual pass that I was going to be playing anyway. I doubt I would have gotten the game otherwise.

WoW was a good game that offered good value with its always online mode. It was even good enough to warrant a subscription given that the online features were built into the core features of the game in a way that is simply impossible to do without online.

Of course these days I don’t have to pay if I farm enough gold.

3 Likes
86

Look if after eight years D3 doesn’t have offline mode support. Then add in the fact that D4 won’t means that it is a waste of time to ask for it for D3. So it is time to move on to other games if no offline mode is a deal breaker for you. Look I have already moved on knowing that Diablo Immortal is a game that I will not play due to it being a mobile game.

I use my phones as phones instead of playing games. And when I do get a tablet I will not buy it to play games on. I will use it for religious purposes and religious purposes only. That is what I have chosen which is why Diablo Immortal is not a game for me. I will wait for D4 to come out in order to fill my needs concerning Diablo.

That is what you are telling me that video game software has no cores at all. So that it is just a string of happy accidents that gets the software to work like it does.

How can you do that without a core that is built for offline play where online is secondary.

Oh yeah and have the same code for both is telling players what they need to know in order to take their offline cheats online.

Well then I guess he did learn some things from actual programmers.

Again I will say it would be pointless to use any cheats that you did get from offline mode in D2. Without a robust form of competition you are risking your own account. If you cheated by using modded gear in PvP then you wouldn’t be allowed to PvP with others. Do it in the PvE where other players catch you then you will be other of that portion as well.

Look it is real simple, like I said if I were to place rank one on the paladin ladder. There is no way that any botter, player using modded gear, using hacked gear, or any map editor will change the fact that I got rank one.

I didn’t play D2 online because every time I tried I got so much lag that it was unplayable. Like I said before I tried different computer systems, different internet systems, etc… Nothing worked so I gave up trying to play D2 online.

Since I played offline 99.9% of the time and bought D3. That means that I will probably get D4 when it is released.

Good to see you know that piracy isn’t the only issue.

But the whole point is that doing it for those reasons are still risking your account that won’t really give you any real benefits. That is why it is not likely that they would even bother to try to get modded weapons to the online portion of D2.

But this is no excuse to abandon what has helped prevent the types of cheaters that consoles and NS have seen. I am sure that the day that D3 gets offline mode. Unless the servers are shut down for good we will see modded gear creep into the online portion of D3.

Why not offline only, it saves the company a whole lot of money in server cost. Along with knowing that players will be saddled with the cost of hosting servers if they want to play together as a group.

Good to see that you will let Blizz do what it wants to do, even though you don’t agree with them. Allowing them to make their own choices regardless of whether you agree or not is good for you.

More than just the amount of people working on D3. It would cost a lot of money because the core of D3 would have to change. But according to yo D3 doesn’t have a core.

I say that instead of Blizz worrying about offline mode for D4 or this game. What they should focus on is making D4 the highest quality Diablo game that they have released in a long time. A game that you would be proud to play. A game that finally captures the easy to learn difficult to master motto. Maybe even passes the mother test like the days of Brevik.

Hmm, so you finally agree that there is a core for a video game program. I guess there is hope for you after all.

87

It’s literally not what I said in the following sentences but sure, continue twisting my words.

That will make you sound like a rational person to always take things to the most extreme even if the person explicitly states that’s not what they’re saying.

It’s not considering the only difference is that you would have files containing compiled code on your PC, and that’s not worth looking at if you’re trying to find exploits or make cheats.

Decompiling is not an easy process and it doesn’t produce perfect results, on top of the fact that even if you had the source code there would be so many lines of code it would just be inefficient compared to just using debugging tools on the software as it runs.

Add in that lastly even if you know how the game calculates something you can’t do anything about it if it’s running on the server. It hardly matters if I know how to modify drop rates in singleplayer if that code runs on the server in multiplayer, because I can’t modify the server.

Oh boy you really didn’t play Diablo 2 online, did you?

When the modded items found their way to closed from open battle net they were absolutely used in PvP to the point where I couldn’t PvP on my Sorceress because I’d just heal half the players in the match if I tried to attack them.

and on open battle net it was pretty much entirely cheaters regardless of PvP or PvE. Anybody who wanted to be legit was on closed.

Competition is not the only reason people cheat. Keep in mind I’m saying that the existence of offline didn’t add to things in Diablo 2, not that people didn’t cheat.

People absolutely cheated in Diablo 2. People would cheat in Diablo 3 even if they removed the leaderboards.

People still get benefits out of cheating and exploiting stuff. Usually it’s to bypass the need to grind out gear farming in a game like Diablo.

The biggest problem with Diablo 3 on console as I understand it is that it’s designed to work a lot like Diablo 1 because Blizzard underestimated people being able to mod their consoles.

That’s why me and some others go on about separating the modes entirely. You can’t allow an offline character to be used in online play, otherwise this exact scenario happens.

I wonder why the person going on about getting the most value for their money would also not want online modes entirely removed from games.

It’s almost like this entire point of yours is completely stupid because I was never arguing that online was inherently bad, but rather that removing offline was the thing that was bad unless the game offers some kind of unique value that you could not otherwise have with offline like what WoW used to do.

This is only according to you because you like to make up fantasies where I’ve said things I didn’t actually say.

A game that is as good as possible would include an offline mode for a game like Diablo, in my opinion.

It’s amazing what you can learn when you actually read the things I post instead of making up fantasies about what I’m saying.

Maybe one day there will be hope for you on that.

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88

Really, dont try to claim that other people are deflecting.

When people show you are wrong about cheating, you jump to “oh, but piracy!”, when people show you are wrong about piracy, you jump to “oh, but cheating”.

Or maybe they will be happy and produce better games, because the customers brought the game in the direction they wanted, even though their ignorant bosses/shareholders had demanded an online only pay to win battle royale.
Who knows!

I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of games released today is offline only.
Anyway, nobody is asking for Diablo 4 to be offline only.

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You keep saying you can have perfect separation and I say you can’t. There will be some bleed over from offline mode.

If people can do what should’ve been impossible to do with Open IV modding tool for games like GTA. Getting mods made by that tool that was suppose to block the mod from being played online. Still malicious mods made it to the online version. It was so bad at one point the makers of GTA sent a cease and desist letter to the makers of Open IV. Of course they have since come to an agreement with Open IV makers that allows them to still make the modding tool. Now they only go after the ones that use it to cheat.

Mind telling me how Open IV mods were allowed to make it to the online portion of GTA 5 which is GTA Onlne. That tool was suppose to block mods from making it online, but still players found a way to make it happen.

How long were those players allowed to do that before being kicked from the PvP players.

No offline mode in D2 would’ve mean no open battle.net. Which in turn no cheats, nor would they have been able to dupe by crashing the servers. It gave them the tools to cheat.

I am stating a simple fact that if I were to get rank one of any class in D2 ladders then no one else would be able to knock me off of that rank one. While my rank one would be legit. No botter or one that got modded gear or even a trainer would change the fact that I am rank one.

With D3 it is different I could get on one of my characters when the new ear starts. If I am one of the first ones to clear even a mid tier GR I will be rank one with that clear. Sure it won’t last very long at all. That is what I am talking about. D2’s ladders are etched in stone when the person ranks on them. D3’s isn’t etched in stone and change and does change.

You are not gonna get the same benefits from cheating.

From what I have heard that the NS is suppose to be what you are looking for. Where you can’t take your offline characters online. But still season 18 had those cheats that I have mentioned earlier, modded gear.

They decided to make D3 online only. It wasn’t launched with offline mode then taken away. Nor did they say during the development that it would have offline mode then it was cut at the last moment.

It does add value, I don’t have to worry about modded gear showing up in D3. I don’t have to worry about playing with ones like Wolfcryer or Rhykker if I wanted to. I won’t have to say do they play offline or not. Because I know that online only means they are online like me. All I have to do is to be on when they are on and team up with them if that is what I want to do.

If I were to take a course in video game coding. Then I would get to the point of learning about online only, offline only, and online with offline mode support what would the teacher be telling me as far as how to set each one up? If you work for a video game making company it would be a good idea to learn how to do all three.

I did mention all three things that I could think of as to why D3 is online only and one comes from Blizz themselves.

1.) They don’t want to separate the player base. Where one person plays offline and the other online. Then when the offline wants to play with his online friend. He would have to leave his comfort zone of offline to play with him.
2.) Piracy, even though its full impact is not known. It still must be enough for it to be an issue with game companies like Blizz. It is their choice, even though other companies choose otherwise.
3.) Cheating, I am wrong here. Then please explain where are the modded gear that the NS has had problems with in season 18. I have played almost every season, save a few that I wasn’t interested in playing and I have checked the leader boards of every season that I have played and I have never seen any modded gear. Nor have I seen posts or threads on the PC forums complaining about modded gear.

Why not offline only, after all you don’t have to worry about other players cheating. You don’t have to worry about error codes. If you get error codes then there is something wrong with the game itself. No DDoS to worry about either.

It would be so much cheaper for Blizz if they done that. Because then they don’t have to spend money on servers for D4.

Of course it comes with the con of not being able to play together like some would like to do. It also comes with the down side of not being able to trade at all. But players can adjust by setting those things up on their own through some sort of modern Lan party.

90

No…

Nonsense.
How does having a core (or not having one) even relate in any way to whether it was randomly strung together.
Can you define what a software core is in your mind?

How would you know. It is quite clear you cant tell.

A cheater would easily beat you to being number one. You can reach lvl 99 in less than a second offline in D2 with a character editor.
So yeah, it is quite simple.

Core features has absolutely nothing to do with a core of video game code.

Yeah, you keep saying that. And you keep being wrong.

No, that only shows GTA did not have separation. They probably hadn’t even tried.

The GAME didnt try to stop the mod from working online. The DEVS did not try to stop the mod from working online. A crappy mod maker had tried to make their mod not work online, and they failed at it. Seriously.

Great idea. Then you can come back and tell us you understand what people have been telling you all along.

Because it makes the game worse.
You dont have to worry about any of those issues even if there is online and offline. You can simply play offline if you dont want to worry.

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91

Why not Offline only? Because that wasn’t what the topic was about until you brought it up like it’s the only result. At this point you’re just skipping the slippery slope fallacy and jumping oover the side of your self made slide.

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Okay but it didn’t happen in Diablo 2, so your example of GTA 5 doesn’t mean a whole lot.

GTA 5 online is also a P2P game, which saves on money but is also a very bad idea if you don’t want cheating happening in the game.

P2P means that it’s not actually Rockstar’s server running the game. It means that one of the players in the game, who is called the host, is acting as the server.

I don’t think we have to worry about Diablo 4 being P2P considering that DIablo 2 closed battle net and Diablo 3 aren’t P2P.

I’ll let you know just as soon as the PvP players kick them.

Oh they’d be able to dupe by crashing the servers. They did it in WoW too and that game is built similarly to Diablo 3 in that half the game runs on the server and there is no offline option.

Also they could have removed open battle net, left singleplayer, and the modded items never would have appeared.

It doesn’t matter that “if offline mode wasn’t there, you wouldn’t have open bnet”. Clearly open bnet was the weak link in Diablo 2’s setup, not the offline mode.

I am also stating a simple fact that people cheat in video games even if there is no competitive reason to do so and even if it risks your account.

Regardless of what you want to say about Diablo 2’s ladder, cheating still happened in the game. We had map hacks and bots.

So this whole thing about Diablo 2’s ladder not mattering doesn’t really mean a whole lot in a discussion about cheating.

Well it took me all of 15 seconds on Google to find this isn’t true and that you can take an offline character into online on the NS.

You just can’t create a seasonal character while offline, but you can take it offline once it’s been created.

I mean removed as in “removed compared to earlier games in the franchise”.

You could have all that you’re going on about even if an offline mode exists. It being in the game does not mean you can’t just choose to always play online if that’s your thing.

If you were to take a course in coding at all you’d learn there is no one way of doing any given task, but I would hope the teacher would explain to you that if you were going to have a game with both offline and online support that the offline mode doesn’t need to have the code that handles all the networking between multiple players.

A lot of the game logic is shared between the two(enemy AI doesn’t need to be rewritten, for example, just moved to the server) but the game needs a whole bunch of extra code to handle the server component and you can make the server the authority.

Putting all that stuff into the offline mode is just a waste of resources.

What I was originally trying to argue against with this whole “offline cores” nonsense is the idea that the mere existence of offline mode turns the online mode into an essentially offline focused codebase.

You’re fully capable of shifting code to the server for the online mode of the game, and that code can’t really be touched unless they gain access to the server(Which if they can do that, coding it to be like Diablo 3 wouldn’t help you either).

and even if people could decompile the offline files that you have, reading through lines of code to find exploits is a massive waste of anybody’s time.

We have better tools for finding exploits in games that don’t rely on us actually needing to see the source code.

Tools that exist right now and will work for Diablo 4 because Blizzard can’t very well change how Windows manages resources for applications.

93

GTA 5 is P2P? Damn :rofl: Completely invalidates it as an example of online security.

94

Yeah I’ve not played GTA 5 but from what ShadowAegis was saying it sounded like it was P2P so I Googled it and, sure enough: It’s apparently P2P.

Which even Diablo 2 closed bnet didn’t use that.

95

No, but having it more readily available means they aren’t screwing themselves or their customer base over by doing it that way.

I didn’t have problems with the first week of TBC, Wrath, Cataclysm or Pandaria.

That argument is always going to fall flat to me. You’re basically saying companies shouldn’t pioneer because they can’t hit absolutely everybody with their products.

Where would we be if companies had decided not to make computer games at all until maybe 10 years ago because they weren’t reaching the big majority?

Arguably we don’t gain a whole hell of a lot of value out of some of the tech improvements either. Sure, I can play Overwatch at 200fps… too bad I really can’t perceive the difference between that and 100fps. But I don’t see anyone complaining about that… and it would seem we should, because THAT ends up costing us $$ in the end.

96

There is nothing pioneering about being online only for games that would work just fine offline as well.

Nobody is making Overwatch 200 FPS only, where if your screen only supports 100FPS, the game wont run. So not remotely comparable.
Besides, plenty of people can notice the difference between 100 and 200 FPS.

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97

I wouldn’t be too sure that it won’t happen. I say that the day D3 gets offline mode for PC we will see NS like cheats in the online portion. It is not a matter of if but when.

Core is a central or most important part of something. That is why I used foundation of a building as an example earlier. Without a solid foundation buildings would get knocked over real easy.

Why else do we see so many problems with cheats other than bots in games with offline mode. It is not just the fact that you have things like open bnet. Nope there are games with offline mode that have cheats other than bots without such a setup.

Look days after a person gets rank one on the D3 leader boards can be moved off if someone else beats his clear. Whereas D2’s ladders are fixed. When that rank one comes because player A got level 99 first. No, botter or cheater of any kind is gonna remove that person. That is unless you are saying that the rank 99 is based on how long it takes to get there. Meaning that the one at the top is the one that not only got level 99 but done it in the fastest time of the rest.

I did look at the rankings years ago and I never saw any clocks in days, hours, minutes and seconds. Nor any other thing that would equate to being like a time clock.

But the core of the video game affects everything in that game.

What you say you can have perfect separation. Well if I can still use a hero editor in D2 and then move that character online to get level 99 as fast as the flash then that perfect separation goes out the window.

According to the ones that made the tool it said that the tool was suppose to the job of blocking the mods, not the game.

Again if a mod making tool that was designed to where it wouldn’t be possible to take mods online and players done it. That means that they done what was deemed impossible. That means don’t think that perfect separation is possible. Because someone will come along and sink that supposedly Titanic of separation.

Look what I am saying is that if I get told the same things that naksiloth was saying then that would prove that he is right.

But then again if I had such training and it did indeed say the same things you wouldn’t listen to it.

I am just stating facts. Without online you have no worries about server cost, maintenance, upgrading, etc…

Look again I say to you like I did Shadout. It is not the game’s job of blocking the mods. It was suppose to be the job of the mod making tool itself.

Are you joining random PUGS as far as PvP goes. If that is the case then there is the answer that a lot of players have found. From what I have heard concerning PvP in D2 that the majority only PvP within their close circle of friends.

A 2004 game vs a 2012 game. That is a big difference and a lot can change in that time period.

Still it doesn’t change the fact that offline mode makes it easier to do.

Open bnet was there because offline mode existed. Without offline mode in D2 open bnet wouldn’t exist.

To me a ladder that has a fixed ranking system where if you are the first one to level 99 you get rank one. Then no one else will ever be able to knock you off of that rank one during the current ladder season. But that is not the case with D3.

That is why if D3 had offline mode like D2 then we will see the NS type cheats of modded gear in D3’s leader boards.

I think that it is only true if you don’t leave the game. If you leave the game while having a seasonal character is offline. Then that character won’t be allowed back online. Also google said that going offline might mean that you won’t be able to rank on the leader boards.

Sorry but the idea of a feature needing to be permanently married to a series is wrong. There are no features that should be permanently married to diablo franchise.

When I talk about computer course in video game coding I mean video game coding 101. When you first start to code for a game you have to no doubt answer some basic questions about the game you are making. Otherwise you will not be able to set some basic rules that you will have to code for.

I am thinking that if a teachers says you will have to figure out if the game is online only, offline only or online with offline mode support. Then if the teacher goes to talk about client side core and server side core then I will know that naksiloth is right.

It does become offline focus, but you can keep saying otherwise if it would help.

Good hackers will figure out something. If D3 PC version ever has offline mode we will see modded gear in the leader boards. How soon would be unknown. But I do know it will happen. It is a matter of when not if.

98

That depends on whether you view online in genres other than MMOs as advancement or not.

While the reports vary a lot, I haven’t seen anything that says the human eye can notice above 150.

Of course, a lot of those high rates are becoming nonsense as gamers move further and further into 1440p and 4k where they largely aren’t possible yet.

99

Software is not a house, nor is there any limit to what the foundation of your software can be. Such as having offline and online support in equal measures.

Because they dont bother to make a secure online mode. Like many games using P2P, or trusting what the client says is happening in the game.
That doesn’t mean a game with online servers and no client trust would be any less safe with an offline mode.

Yeah, and a cheater will get there faster than a non-cheater, if you can hack your character/items.

Does it now?
Anyway, a core feature still doesn’t mean it is a core part of the game code.

Yeah, but you can’t do that. It would be the easiest thing to prevent that from happening. The server knows what lvl your character is. No matter how many times the client tells it that you really did get 99 lvls in 1 second.

Indeed. The mod maker made a bad mod that didnt do what they said it would do.
It was the game that made it possible to make a bad mod of course.

It was not deemed impossible. The moder maker lied.

A mod maker is not the game developer. A mod maker cant build security into the game servers.
The example is invalid.

Sure. But you would not be told that. Because he was not right.

Sure I would.

What. No. Of course it is the games job.

You rely way too much on hearsay in general.

Planning ahead will save you a lot of headaches down the road - the little coding I do at my job has at least learned me that much :smiley:
But no, nothing is ever set in stone. You can theoretically always go back and change even the most fundamental “core” of your game (though it might easily be so complex to do, that you choose not to bother)

Which your teacher wont do.

Diablo 3 is a pretty good example. They managed to add offline mode to the game just fine when porting it to consoles.

There is zero reason to expect we would see that.
Plenty of online games with offline modes out there without hacked gear. Usually the kinds of cheats you see online is the stuff that is not interacting directly with the game code/data. Like bots, aimbots etc. Then in some games you have wall hacks, map hacks etc. where they alter/read the game data while it runs on your PC (only affecting what you see), in ways that does not interfere with what the server knows.
But changing stuff the server knows about, like your gear or stats? That is much more difficult, and only really happen if the game devs made a mistake (in which case, it will happen with or without offline mode anyway).

Online play is an advancement. Online only is more like a regression.

Even then, that still means you can see the difference between 100 and 200 - but not 150 and 200.
Anyway, these studies typically comes down to what is meant by “notice the difference” (likely also why the studies vary a lot).
When it means “do you see the individual frames” then no, then the number is likely a fair bit lower than 150 for most people with normal eyesight, probably also below 100.
But even if you dont see the individual frames, you might still notice the difference in how smooth things run, how fast the game reacts to your input etc. It can feel smoother even if your eyes cant actually see the frames.
(I dont really believe 150+ is going to matter either, but from 100-150 it is a different story)

100

I also didn’t personally have any bugs when Fallout New Vegas first came out, but it would be dishonest to act like it wasn’t a big thing just because a few people didn’t have problems.

What exactly is Blizzard pioneering? The same basic game they’ve been making since 1997 except they removed offline mode?

Sorry but that argument is going to fall flat with me until Blizzard actually designs the game around the online requirement being part of the core gameplay.

You know, like it was for World of Warcraft.

Simply removing features is not “pioneering”.

As long as you have a monitor that can show that many frames per second, the human eye can perceive the differences on top of faster response times for input.

Not to mention performance improvements really help people with older hardware. I can absolutely notice the difference between playing Overwatch at 30 FPS vs 60 FPS.

Tech improvements also do more than just performance. They can actually add new functionality to the game or things like better visual effects.

101

Okay but that doesn’t actually matter to my argument.

The game is P2P, which makes any security measures you put in place about as useful as a sign that says “don’t”, because P2P means the server is running on the player’s computer and not on Rockstar’s server.

That means people can just mod the security measures out of the game or mod making tool or wherever you put it because it’s all running on the player’s computer.

Diablo does not use this. Diablo 2 closed bnet didn’t do this. Diablo 3 didn’t do this, and I rather suspect Diablo 4 will not do this.

I also actually did a lot of PvPing back in the day so I can tell you from experience and not just “what I heard from some guy” that those modded items were very prevalent.

It can and Diablo 3 was probably more secure against it. Hell, World of Warcraft was more secure against it in 2012 too but the basic underlying concept is still there.

Also offline mode doesn’t make it easier to do because it exploits something in the code that doesn’t exist in offline mode.

People dupe items with server crashes by exploiting the fact that the server will auto save your character every so often to protect against loosing progress in the event of a disconnect. Using this they try to get one character to roll back so they have the item again, and a second character is saved with the item that was given to them resulting in both characters having the item.

Removing trading entirely actually protects against this better than removing offline. If you can’t give other players items, you can’t use this.

Perhaps you should advocate for removing trading including the 2 hour trade window with anybody who was in the game at the time.

and without open bnet the modded items wouldn’t have appeared, even if they left offline mode in.

Your attempts to twist it will not change that fact.

You can think that all you want, but people who have actually played on the NS are saying that’s not how it works.

You can take a character offline and back online, you just need to make them while you’re online.

Also your obsession with the ladder is ridiculous. Yes a more competitive environment encourages more cheating but a non-competitive environment does not remove any reason to actually cheat.

People cheated on Diablo 2 despite you claiming there is no reason to do so when they’d be risking their accounts. People cheated on non-ladder characters so you didn’t even have the initial race to 99. That’s where the modded items actually appeared.

People are cheating where you claim they have no reason to and all they would be doing is risking their account. Your constant attempts to deflect by pointing out Diablo 3’s ladder system is utterly meaningless.

Well any teacher will tell you that you’re using the wrong terminology when you talk about “server side core” and “client side core” to start, so they definitely will not be using those words.

But beyond that while it’s good practice to have everything planned out well ahead of time you could still add an online mode to a game you originally planned to be offline only.

The fact that people have modded multiplayer into Skyrim should be a testament to that.

Technically speaking Blizzard could even make an offline version of World of Warcraft without needing to recode the entire game. There would just be little reason to because the online potion is part of the underlying design of the game.

Which it’s not in Diablo.

If we saw modded items on PC in Diablo 3 would depend a whole lot on how Blizzard coded the offline mode to work. If it was like console where you could take an offline character online then yeah, it would happen within 24 hours.

Which again is why we say it’s so important to separate the modes and to never allow an offline character to be taken online.

They had it almost figured out in 2000. With Diablo 2 if you had no open battle net, you would have had no modded items.

Nothing from offline singleplayer actually got through.

I would hope Blizzard in 2020 can figure out what Blizzard North in 2000 did.

102

not happening, their CEO raked in about 100x more money than other employees. All they care is money now, understandable from business standpoint but as a gamer it really disappoint me.