Saboth wrote on May 15, 2012, 20:33:
Nothing will change until we start seeing some lawsuits. You buy a single player game, you should be able to play it. MMOs are a completely different story because you need servers to play with other people. The problem is, many companies (like Blizzard) toss in a few online components (like the trade house) and try and weasel around the issue.
30-40% of the USA has no broadband internet, yet we are moving more and more towards online only DRM and having to fork over personal information and create "accounts" with logins just to play a single player game. Oh hey...you got hacked after forcing me to give you all my info? Great! Now that every game company is requiring it, that's 10x more chances for it to get hacked. So what do I get out of it? A free year of credit monitoring? Well I'm glad identity thieves only use the data they stole in that first year immediately after stealing it.
Sue? For what? You can't sue. You know going in that a constant online connection was required. So long as Blizzard provides a "reasonable" - that's the key word as it applies to legal issues - effort to provide enough server capacity so that consumers can use the product they paid for then they're in the clear. I'm sure that even in there TOU and EULA they state that in order to use their product that you must understand and agree that you may not always be able to use said product when you want.
And that's the major problem with this model. If they decide to kill the servers next week because they no longer feel like supporting the game you have zero recourse. What about when the paid content starts coming down the pipe? Or how about when they decide they want to launch a "premium" service so that only those paying a monthly sub don't have to queue for SP server access while the rest of you do. I don't doubt for a second they have this all in the works right now. That's why I won't support them.
"The horse I bet on was so slow, the jockey kept a diary of the trip." - Henny Youngman