Good marketing or just really stupid?

[Wyrm]

You do realize that's the correct way to support multiple users on a single system playing the game, right?  Writing savegame files into the game directory means that every user who plays must have write access to that directory, and most likely that the players can step on each other accidentally.  ("That was your savegame I just deleted?  I thought it was mine!", etc.)

That's a bit impractical for me though, I'm the only one with access to this computer, so I don't need multi-user support. I'm already sick and tired of programs that create more directories than they should or place files where they shouldn't (seriously... games don't need to add themselves to the Windows directory). Add to that the fact that some games are programmed very sloppily and make a mess of the registry and I'm ready to throw them right into the garbage can (and spend the next few weeks finding all the crap they left in the registry and hidden throughout the hard drive).

But anyways... My biggest complaint about using the My Documents folder for saving games (aside from the fact that it's being used at all) is there's no unified method for it. If Microsoft had built in a sub-directory for games the way they did with pictures (another rant) it wouldn't have been quite as annoying. But since they didn't you wind up with about 5 different sub-directories for 2 games; one game makes a "Saved Games" sub with a "Game saves from our company here" sub of its own, MS games have a "Microsoft Saved Games" sub with "Saves" and "Halo Saves" with sepereate directories for every profile" and yet another company will ignore those save directories and just put an "Our game saves" directory in My Documents so that by the time you've got all of your games installed, the computer is completely cluttered with completely useless directories that don't have any business being there.

I like to keep games compartmentalized. If I want to do something with a certain game (such as modding or making backups of critical files that aren't on CD) I don't want want to have to go to 10 different places to get all the files I'll need. Diablo 2 would be the (somewhat) perfect example. If I want to play the Median 2 mod, I make a backup of the dlls and mpqs from the original that I need to and put them into a zip file. Then I put my regular SP saves directory into that zip file so that when I'm done with M2 and want to sign on to bnet to check my accounts, I just put the M2 stuff in a zip the same way I did with the regular game stuff and then do a copy/paste of the original back into the D2 directory. If D2 saved games to the My Documents folder, that's already creating more work for me when I want to switch between the mod and the original. The process gets even more complicated with multiple mods. Even if you put the saves into the same zip you've still got the extra work to go through unzipping some of the file to one place and some to another. That's extra work I shouldn't need to do.

It took Blizzard 8 patches to Diablo 1

Diablo 1 was written for Win 95 back when multi-user systems was still a fairly new concept.

It's badly named, has too long a name

I only find that humorous because docume~1 is the DOS shortened version of "documents and settings."

not the sorry excuse that is Windows Explorer

I never had a problem with the old explorer from Win 95 that was still a seperate entity from the OS (or was it all the way back to 3.11?). Once they came up with the idea to integrate it into the OS... well... let's just say it still gives me a headache.