01-27-2004, 02:58 AM
Yogi_Baar,Jan 25 2004, 02:16 AM Wrote:It might seem like a dumb idea to me at first, but I think I can understand Blizzard's intention here. Reducing the load on their servers is always a good thing. Plus, if players get pissed off by regularly dropping out of games, it isn't Blizzard's problem, it's the players' own crappy connection that's to blame. Smart.It probably had nothing to do with client\server load. D1 was originally written by Condor who Blizzard bought right before they released Diablo. Blizzard then decided to make it multi-player over TCP\IP since they had such success with Warcraft 2 (and IPX was on the way out with Windows 95). So Blizzard essentially hacked in multi-player (and some say the point and click movement style) as an afterthought to a game that was written by a fledgling company without any thoughts for multi-player.
Each peer must therefore ALWAYS keep its peers in PERFECT sync for peer-to-peer architecture to work as it's intended. And it seems to me that Blizzard didn't quite get at least one of the two upper-case words.
Blizzard didn't so much as not get it as the software architecture and computer hardware at the time would have been incapable of handling it. Diablo came out in 1997 when Pentium II chips weren't even released yet (or were just being released). They picked a different method of handling the game architecture and it wasn't implemented as well as it could be. For the administrative reasons that Crystalion stated, it is only reasonable to expect the poor performance in D1 multi-player in a time when Pentium 90s and 56k modems ruled the home internet waves. The whole "get it out the door and patch it later" mentality of gaming companies is only hurting the industry even more.