Bolty's Beta Report 2 - More Musings

[Concillian]

They say it's to stop cheating, but then they could have allowed offline-play for singe-player.

umm... not and have any measure of anti-cheating. I think you don't understand why they are calling it an anti-cheating move if you think it can be both anti-cheating and have an offline play mode at the same time.

Part of why duping and hacking was so prevalent in Diablo and Diablo II was because you could disassemble the game file and figure out the loopholes. If they keep huge chunks of the game off of the local drives and on the server, you can't just reverse engineer hacks, dupes and cheats.

Map hack is the easiest and most understandable example. Anytime they 'fixed' map hack, there would be a "new" map hack within days because everything was local. Move the map information to the server and you can't even figure out how it would work to display full map information, because that information is not given to you.

If you have an online component that ignores those chunks, then the chunks are still there for people to reverse engineer.

Now I don't know what the "real" reason is, but I doubt it's anti-piracy. Diablo II didn't really have a large piracy issue did it? I mean mostly it was an online game and you couldn't pirate and play online. I doubt they're too concerned about the occasional single player gamer, I think they're just more concerned about the online experience that the vast majority are interested in and are willing to alienate the small offline single player population as a result.