Because the internet was still fairly new and growing. Keep in mind the early 90s argued the internet was going to be nothing more than a glorified chat service fad that would die off swiftly.
MUDs and Battle Net showed people a very small glimpse of what was possible. Hell I think Ultima Online launched in 1997 and Meridian in 95 in a lighter sense. As far as Ultima Online goes that was a fully online game and was the birth of MMORPGs in their current inception. In fact the term “MMORPG” was coined by Richard Garriot himself when he was describing Ultima Online. I think back to that old movie “The Cable Man” where Carrey remarks at a satellite: “This is the information super highway, soon we will be shopping from our homes, a kid playing Mortal Kombat in his living room can soon be playing against another player living in Vietnam.”
Internet gaming never really took off until after Battle Net showing the viability of it, as well as really terrible internet speeds.
mate. BBMs have been a thing (and a multiplayer enviroment) for a VEEERRRRRYYY long time.
hell ever IRC channels via MiRC held some sort of text base role play for people.
p sure i was playing shandalar/ BBM titles waaaaaaay before diablo was even pitched.
heck even AoE had it’s own multiplayer feature if you looked for it.
Only about 1% of the world populace at that time would be able to use internet infrastructure for gaming. And of those, only about 0.5% of 0.5% would have the connection speed to play d1 online.
Why would blizzard develop and implement technology for that?
I know d1 had hardline lan functionality, but internet functionality? BEFORE the internet?
tell me where in vanilla we had layers, show me where in vanilla we had 15k people on a server, show me where at any point in warcraft’s history blizzard didn’t cater to the horde. Cross realm BG’s are being put in so the horde don’t cry. The EXACT same reason they were put in to begin with… Horde tears. When there are so few alliance left on the servers that even X realm BGs have long queue times blizzard will open the merc system due to horde tears.
Neither faction is required to play this game. Blizzard has no problems with servers being 90% one faction or another, because it doesn’t matter. Just look at PvE realms… they get along just fine not caring at all what the other faction does.
We are not getting the vanilla cross realms BTW. Vanilla cross realms were in a battlegroup of 8 - 12 servers, not across every server in a region.
Please stop with “durrrr it twas in verniller!” because you obviously never played vanilla.
AoE servers were a thing. MSNZone was around same time as Bnet, right? LOL This is hurting my game psyche recalling all this. AoERoR game ladders and tourneys, man…
sometimes words are super hard for people and don’t understand ambiguous statements result in sharp conclusion that which aren’t totally out of perspective.
Hey aren’t you the guy complaining for boycotting bgs from the Alliance? What happened to “When BGs come out the Horde are so trash they’re gonna get steamrolled”?
being 32 years young… and a canadian in the present year that i am in, i can say my memory is not what it once used to be so anything im claiming from my past is purely straws.
thank you for updating that
i’m still an OG heat . net / gamespy user from THOSE days.
Imagine thinking a thread with 175 posts is ever going to stick to the same topic. Threads derail all the time. How it goes, honestly it’s better this way.