User Information - Troy C.

News Comments > Star Wars: The Old Republic Cuts

Blackhawk wrote on May 22, 2012, 23:02: What people are seeing now is, likely as not, months worth of hacked accounts being accessed for the first time all at once. That's part of it. I still get 2-3 emails daily telling me there are account problems, or investigations, or that I was banned, or whatever from World of Warcraft. On both of my main email accounts, one of which was never associated with anything to do with the game. There's a concerted and ongoing phishing scam for WoW/Bnet accounts unlike anything most people have really had to deal with on their other accounts before. The other part is the people who said they had authenticators didn't. The mobile SMS tool is what most of them seem to be talking about, which isn't the same thing as the mobile authenticator (or the key fob, obviously) and doesn't have the same protections on it. It sucks, a lot, and I wish terrible things upon the people doing the hacks. It's going to get worse before it gets better with the lure of the RMAH out there to make the payoff for nailing a well-geared account even bigger.

Re: Star Wars: The Old Republic Cuts

May 22, 2012, 18:28

News Comments > Diablo III Hacking?

Lorcin wrote on May 22, 2012, 18:07: The space combat was quite possibly the biggest single disappointment of the game. In retrospect, the space combat was actually the only thing I really enjoyed with the game. Everything else just felt like a waste of time.

119.

Re: General complaints, longish

May 21, 2012, 18:49

Overon wrote on May 21, 2012, 18:06: When you have real money in play, then you are really motivating the hackers to look for exploits to make real money. This is what has worried me about it, too. Game design aspects aside, a real money AH means a lot more people seeing $$$ in grabbing people's accounts. Blizzard already has the only games I've ever honestly worried about my accounts with in the first place, and I get multiple phishing emails every single day warning me about my "compromised account" or that my account is under investigation. On both of my email accounts, one that I never used for anything related to their games at all. I have an authenticator, but it just seems like a matter of time until the stuff that generated this headline becomes a huge game-breaking deal to a lot more people.

19.

Re: Monitor Troubles

May 21, 2012, 17:30

News Comments > Diablo III Hacking?

nin wrote on May 21, 2012, 15:48: but Viewsonic is just as great. We went through some viewsonics here at work that sucked ass...not a week went by that we didn't have to call in at least one for service. I will never buy their stuff... I bought a Viewsonic 27" last year, and it's awful. I'll never buy another one. It was the cheapest 27" around, and unfortunately it lived up to it in color quality. http://www.overclock.net/t/1225919/yamakasi-catleap-monitor-club After my friend bought one of those they're talking about in that thread, I picked up a Catleap myself; 2560x1440 27" IPS monitor for less than half of what a similar one costs here. It's a risk to buy it, since they're coming directly from Korea and warranty work would probably be too expensive to be worth it, but the monitors are beautiful and the price is great. IPS color quality on a decent gaming monitor at extremely high res. You do need a pretty hefty video card to make it worthwhile, though.

89.

Re: Diablo III Hacking?

May 21, 2012, 16:49

Flatline wrote on May 21, 2012, 15:48: I'll go one further. The game itself is horseshit. Seriously if I was reviewing it I'd give it a 6. Had a LAN party on Saturday, and all four of us pretty much said at the end of it that it was the most fun we've had with a game in a LONG time. I've been playing the crap out of it, and I'm still enjoying it as much now as when I first picked it up. To each his own, I guess. Once you get up to level 30 and have every slot unlocked, you can use the skill system to turn a character into something completely different if you want to...and changing abilities for situational purposes is extremely useful regardless of the class from what I've seen. If you're not having fun, though, stop playing it. It's a great game, but that doesn't mean everyone has to like it...if you don't, find something you do instead.

News Comments > Op Ed

Re: Op Ed

May 19, 2012, 11:53

News Comments > Torchlight II Stress Test This Weekend

I thought that review scores being obviously and blatantly skewed by hype, glossing over of issues on big releases that would be hammered on smaller ones, and recently even a general distaste for their own readership was enough reason to see that game journalism fails. Maybe it's just a case of emulating the biggest, though. IGN is the worst at all of those and others have tried to match it, in the same way that Fox got big and the other news organizations shot their coverage full of terrible opinion pieces to keep up.

43.

Re: Torchlight II Stress Test This Weekend

May 18, 2012, 11:56

deqer wrote on May 18, 2012, 11:39: Ya, way to divide your resources amongst two things of the same category making yourself 50% useful in both games, rather 100% useful in one game that you could put all your resources into. What about either game is "useful"? Games are entertainment, people play them for fun. No one will ever care how much of a single player game you completed or how pro your gear is or how dedicated to it you are other than you.

52.

Re: Out of the Blue

May 16, 2012, 22:57

News Comments > DC Universe Online DLC Next Month

Bhruic wrote on May 16, 2012, 20:54: That sounds like what Microsoft said about Internet Explorer in Windows. But that's just a backwards way of looking at it. Are the features "inseparable"? Possibly. But they are that way because Blizzard designed them to be that way. It's not an inherent trait of the features. They could easily have included the exact same feature set for people playing online, and had them not enabled when not. You cut out the part of my post where I more or less said that, and I disagree strongly that it could have been done easily. They could have designed the game to have two separate components, and I'd agree that I wouldn't have minded at all if they had, but it would have required a completely independent peer to peer client to be designed to keep it separate from the online game and its auction houses. It's easy to see why they didn't go that route, if unfortunate. The only point I was trying to make was that it's not really just DRM, even if it does serve that purpose as well, since the always-on design in the game is based around actual features and server-side game hosting as opposed to just making sure you aren't pirating the game like UBI's setup does.

Re: DC Universe Online DLC Next Month

May 16, 2012, 22:27

I thought Mark was done doing the Joker after Arkham City? Unless these were recorded some time ago...

38.

Re: Out of the Blue

May 16, 2012, 18:53

Cutter wrote on May 16, 2012, 17:33: And what or why are any of those things necessary for the SP portion of the game? The only thing it impacts is the AH. For those interested in only - or mostly - SP there is zero reason not to have an offline mode. No one is complaining about about being online to access those things or multiplayer. So if you're main thing is SP and you can't play because that portion of the game is entirely dependent on a company to play it - never mind what happens when they feel they want to pull the plug on it or start charging you subscription fees for a "premium" service that determines if you have to queue or not to play - then it's not only entirely fair to comapre the two, it's entirely apt. There is absolutely no excuse whatsoever, none, to not having an offline SP mode. Anything else is just trying to rationalize away people's feelings of hypocritcal guilt for lambasting Ubisoft all these years but caving on buying Diablo 3. I'm definitely not going to argue about the desire for a single-player offline version of the game, because I'd sure go for that. That's how I played Diablo 1 and 2; I barely touched battle.net for either of those games and I could live without the online features in D3, as well. On the same note, though have you played the game yet? I'm not rationalizing away anything, it's just plain and simple not the same thing and it's obvious when you get into the game. The online features they're requiring the connection for are pervasive; they're literally built into every part of the game to the point where they're inseparable. If you were arguing that it was a bad decision to do that, I'd probably be on board at this point. There's a difference between designing the game around those online features, though, and just sticking the online component there to force you to go through them to play it. Unlike UBI's solution, in D3 that online component is a full fledged part of the game and not just authorization or registration. D3's implementation of it goes well beyond what even Starcraft 2 did as far as the online features.

28.

Re: Out of the Blue

May 16, 2012, 16:47

News Comments > Ad Says Guild Wars 2 Next Month

sauron wrote on May 16, 2012, 15:20: I was reading Penny Arcade just now, and they summed this up perfectly: His entire editorial today pretty much sums up what most of us were saying yesterday that was dismissed as just being so much whining. And as far as always-on DRM, you still really can't dismiss Diablo 3's online requirement as just being that. It's a secondary feature, sure, but it does connect you to game services that permeate the game; friend list, auto-joining games, auction house, chat channels, and so on. Ubisoft didn't have that sort of thing with their DRM, so it's not really fair to compare the two. It's definitely valid to question the necessity of the connection for things of dubious use to people who just want single-player Diablo 3, but it's just not the same thing. I'm also not personally of the belief that it was unreasonable to expect Blizzard, who should have been holders of a behemoth of online knowledge and preparedness due to their experience with WoW, to have done better than what they did. Was it unexpected? No, probably not... but that in itself says something about gaming that I've grown to particularly dislike.

20.

Re: Ad Says Guild Wars 2 Next Month

May 16, 2012, 00:44

KTR wrote on May 15, 2012, 23:45: Uh...you do know that NCsoft is doing that on purpose?!? The magic release day patch, ah yes. It's a mythical creature commonly mentioned on message boards leading up to the release date of a game that's clearly not done yet. "Don't you realize we're just testing an outdated version?!?" is my personal favorite version of this. Anyway. Companies aren't in the habit of making their product available without an NDA to people who are seeing an unfinished non-representative version of their work. That's really all there is to it; if what you saw seems definitively like it needs more time in the oven, then it does.

233.

Re: Ships Ahoy - Diablo III

May 15, 2012, 23:54

News Comments > Diablo III Launch: Error 37 Gains Infamy

Cutter wrote on May 15, 2012, 23:01: None of it works becase the installer won't patch on certain 64 bit Vista/Win7 systems. It just hangs and won't update anything. So even if you could DL the full client the moment the updater starts you're fucked. And they've know this for a while now. That's just not dropping the ball, that's just shitting on customers. The release version doesn't have the issue, or didn't for me, even though the open beta did. If you're still having trouble I can dig through my post history for the fix if you want it, I know I posted it here back when open beta was live. It sounds a lot more complicated than it is, really, it's fairly simple to correct once you know what obscure component you're looking for.

34.

Re: Diablo III Launch: Error 37 Gains Infamy

May 15, 2012, 23:50

Shok wrote on May 15, 2012, 23:34: Ok, I'll bite. It is when all I want to play is single player and I'm forced online for inane DRM reasons when a single player component could have been developed in the 12 years between Diablo 2 and 3. I'd like to stick up for the online-only component because it's trying something different that could be kind of cool... but I can't anymore. There's something about the implementation of it that just isn't working. The online parts of it are completely integrated into the game, from global chat channels to always-on friend joining to auction houses, but they're so easily ignored that I have to wonder what the point is if someone isn't interested in those things. If you're not using them, they aren't just extraneous...they're actually detrimental to the game. The more I play (or try to play) the more I think that Starcraft 2's usage of the tools was not just better but smarter. I love the game so far, for the most part, but for me personally the online components aren't worth the hassle. And I just plain don't get the auction house. If you take away the hunt for loot in Diablo 3, I'm not sure I understand the point of playing anymore.

178.

Re: Ships Ahoy - Diablo III

May 15, 2012, 18:16

xXBatmanXx wrote on May 15, 2012, 18:00: Your point is? Name one game that hasn't had issues at launch in the last 10 years. Downtime in mid afternoon on the first day? So what. It isn't as though people don't have things they SHOULD be doing anyway....let me guess...you didn't buy it... You bought a new game and can't play it?!? Well, you should be doing something else anyway, what are you complaining about? You paid for this movie ticket and the theater wouldn't let you in? What are you complaining about, you should be doing something else anyway! You paid for this CD, and can't listen to the music on it? What are you complaining about, there are other things to hear anyway! Come on. It's ridiculous for everything else people do for entertainment, why is it ok for gaming? I can name ten online games that were playable at launch. Give me some time and I can do twenty. That argument doesn't hold water.

100.

Re: Ships Ahoy - Diablo III

May 15, 2012, 15:14

Krovven wrote on May 15, 2012, 14:48: Being mad about it is wasted energy, especially when we all knew this was inevitably what was going to happen. I just can't get on board with it being ok because this stuff happens. It's not unreasonable to expect something better than this. It's not uncommon for MMO's to have lag, queues, whatever on launch day (which is what this basically is, even if a single player MMO). Glitches are one thing, complete stonewalling by the login server and a three hour shutdown in the middle of the day... people are still at work, kids at school, and some haven't even had a chance to get their copy yet. If it can't handle 2am and it can't handle 12pm, it ain't going to be up later either. They've talked in interviews about this being the direction that gaming is going, and today is really a pretty good example of why it shouldn't. I'm not really angry about it, just...disgusted, I guess.

62.

Re: Ships Ahoy - Diablo III

May 15, 2012, 14:19

Creston wrote on May 15, 2012, 14:07: If you have 2 million pre-orders, and you ship an additional 3 million copies to stores, shouldn't you have launch capacity for 5 million copies? That doesn't seem like it's extremely difficult math. But Blizzard figures they can easily get away with less, as people will complain, then get in, and keep playing, and stop complaining. And like I said, if you keep accepting that kind of behavior from a developer, don't be surprised if that's what you get. To be fair, Blizzard isn't always this bad with their launches. World of Warcraft was, but the expansions for the most part were fairly smooth. I haven't played WoW since shortly after Cataclysm launched, though, maybe things have degraded a bit. I wasn't expecting it to be completely smooth for Diablo 3, but as it is it's really apparent that they just plain weren't prepared at all. It's like they're doing their stress testing on launch day.

41.

Re: Ships Ahoy - Diablo III

May 15, 2012, 13:44

theyarecomingforyou wrote on May 15, 2012, 12:21: The game launched 18hrs ago in the UK and the servers are still too busy to connect to. Blizzard really screwed the pooch with this one. Very unimpressed. I got connected last night when it launched, created a character, had the system lag, and it filled all my character slots with the same character. I tried to delete one, the system timed out, and kicked me back to the login screen. Gave up after another 45-50 minutes of trying to get in, so an hour of wasted time. Played this morning for an hour and a half. I love the game, when it's playable...of course, I exited the game to try another character and then the system couldn't create new games. So, here I am again, killing time until the servers are available or able to work. I don't have a problem with requiring a connection to play. I play MMO's all the time. But, didn't Blizzard learn -anything- from World of Warcraft? Or the open beta, that was virtually unavailable to log into during any hour of the day that normal humans are awake? I'm willing to stick up for the decision to make it online if they can ensure that it will be, but for now... I have to admit that the people who were angry about that have been proven right. I know it's day 1, but this isn't their first time stepping up to the plate.

10.

Re: Ships Ahoy - Diablo III

May 15, 2012, 11:06

News Comments > 38 Studios in Financial Trouble?

Creston wrote on May 15, 2012, 11:01: Any news on how this plays on less-than-stellar connections? And does it actually install on Win7-64? (Since the demo wouldn't?) The open beta took tweaking to install, but the full game didn't. I had the same problem as you did with the OB if I remember right, but the full game was no problem at all. On the connection...I think the most problems are going to be on their end right now. After more than an hour of trying to get on last night I just gave up and went to bed; if they couldn't handle the load of people logging on in the early hours of the morning I can't imagine it's going to be playable at prime time.

13.

Re: 38 Studios in Financial Trouble?

May 14, 2012, 23:39