"Always On" and food for thought

by kapowaz, Friday, March 08, 2013, 09:51 (4375 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Like Diablo 3, running critical code server side is without question an anti-piracy move.

I'd question that it has anything to do with piracy in the case of the always-on requirement with Diablo III, which I suspect Bungie will have something in common with: a strong desire to guarantee the integrity of the game state data.

Going back a few years, Diablo II had a major problem with item duplication due to locally-run exploits. There were also black markets for item trading, through eBay and other places. Knowing that people would want to trade items for real money whether or not they gave it their blessing, Blizzard decided to incorporate a real money auction house in-game, but that necessitated having pretty strong confidence in the integrity of the game systems. It's no good having a RMAH if it's trivially easy to duplicate a bunch of high-demand items and then sell them — it'd ruin the game for everyone.

The lack of an always-online requirement for the PS4 version of Diablo III has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with the PS4 being a closed system that's far less likely (impossible?) to reverse engineer the loot system for, and so the auction house is safer. That's assuming they're even going to launch a RMAH for Diablo III on PS4 — maybe they're not, and that's another reason they're happy with it running entirely locally?

Either way, piracy is a red herring. Sometimes users get caught in the crossfire, but unlike the more overtly obnoxious efforts of DRM, this kind of always-online system is usually a design decision made to enforce some other requirement.