About the Diablo Beta

[Trivenefica]

Yesterday evening i've read a long text post about the impressions of a guy who has played the Beta. Something of great importance? Well, not at all :) Most of it are first time impressions but you will also find very few details about the beta itself. Read it here.

[dotPlaid]

From the tester re: Bnet

I was slightly relieved to see that when I logged on that everyone else had to start over too. I jumped right in with zWolfMan the Wizard Character, Man it was awesome! There were so many helpful people!

Ah, the days.

I guess my memory is going Swiss because I got out of the Army in March '97, and by then both meself and the guy across the hall in the barracks had killed Big D in games we'd played together via modem, shouting to one another with both of our doors open. I had no idea we'd done that in just a few months.

On a related note, I also remember watching him play D1 the first day he bought the game. He loved it, but was getting frustrated at how difficult it was becoming. When I asked him about that red button with a '+' on it in the lower left corner of the screen, he said, "What? Oh, I don't know, I hadn't seen that."

Cheers.

//edit as the meat of the quote hadn't been...quoted.

[Nystul]

Funny stuff. It brings back memories of my early days on b.net and how crazy everything was. The times when you'd pop open the Butcher's door without knowing what it was and all your teammates would run away.

It's mindboggling that Blizzard North didn't addres the duping bug before releasing the game. But ultimately, I think the backup utilities still would have been created, and exploited for cheating purposes, and the game would have been cheat-free for only a few months.

[Thecla]

Nice read, Thanks for the link!

It's mindboggling that Blizzard North didn't addres the duping bug before releasing the game. But ultimately, I think the backup utilities still would have been created, and exploited for cheating purposes, and the game would have been cheat-free for only a few months.

It is strange that Bliz did nothing about the dupe bug. But Enigma's backup utility was created inside a month anyway (I still recall trying to trade a Mindcry I found on b.net a month and a half into the game (it looked pretty good to me, and still does actually :) ) and being completely ignored because everybody already had, or was only interested in having, a dreamflange. With D1 data being stored client side, there was nothing they could do.

What is really mindboggling is that they did such an incredibly abysmal job in controlling cheating in D2. That's their true shame.

[Nystul]

What is really mindboggling is that they did such an incredibly abysmal job in controlling cheating in D2. That's their true shame.

It is a puzzler. They pulled off the hardest part, hosting all of those games and characters server-side without any pay-to-play charges, and seemed to do a pretty good job of having enough resources to handle it without things getting too bogged down. Unfortunately, they didn't take full advantage of the security that setup can offer, and some of the types of cheating that happened are pretty inexcusable. I wouldn't expect them to be able to stop bots (I don't think it's feasibly possible), and a few other things (like maphack) may have been a worthwhile compromise in favor of smooth gameplay. Other examples are less acceptable though. Players should never have been able to dupe items, sniff out results before gambling, etc.