Bolty's Beta Report 2 - More Musings

[Kevin]

Hi,

I'm sure there is a perfectly good explanation for the the online requirement

Of course there is, the reason is anti-piracy.

I'm sure piracy is part of it, but I recall reading somewhere that a lot of the action/calculations/mob behavior/etc takes place on Blizzard's servers, similar to WoW. Asking for an offline mode would be like wanting to play WoW offline- it's just not going to happen due to the client-server setup.

I'll see if I can dig up an article that talks about that.

It's a little of everything (again why does a decision only have to be because of one factor?).

It makes piracy harder. It makes cheating harder. It allows the offloading of some of the processing to servers which can lessen the load on clients and allow a slightly broader player base. It allows somethings to be changed server side without requiring a client patch.

Since we are looking at a business the decisions are going to likely be mostly driven by revenue. Less piracy should lead to better sales (this is a debatable point, I freely admit). Less cheating creates better customer loyalty which can help revenue. Less cheating combined with a real money auction house that can generate revenue for the company was certainly a factor as well.

The patching stuff likely reduces development cost a bit as well.

I think it's a bit from all the pots. I don't think it's just piracy, or just cheating, or just performance. It may be just money though.