Digital piracy (long)

[Andara Bledin]

You're certainly defending consumer fuckery tooth and nail here.

Defending a company's right to maximize profits is so far removed from claiming their perfect that I honestly don't know why you said it.

Blizzard has botched pretty much every major event with WoW as well as several major patches and sometimes even just maintenance for shits and giggles.

That doesn't invalidate my statement in any manner whatsoever. The amount of time spent "botched" from expansions, updates, patches, maintenance, and fixes is utterly negligible against the time the systems spend running just fine.

Then having it take down other, totally unrelated games being played by people that didn't even buy the game that caused the problem in the first place?

Not sure what you're referring to here. Care to expand?

Cept its spurned a big discussion in the gaming community and industry over the direction of gaming and how long before the industry collapses under its own weight because of it. Other than that though, perfectly fine. ;p

Which one? There are a hundred different discussions about the direction gaming is going at any given time, and most of them have been going on for something on the order of decades.

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[Gravekeeper]

I'm sorry, when did I ever claim they were? And if I didn't, then who are you responding to while quoting me?

You're certainly defending consumer fuckery tooth and nail here.

The vast majority of the time their server setup runs without error.

Never played WoW? -.-

Blizzard has botched pretty much every major event with WoW as well as several major patches and sometimes even just maintenance for shits and giggles.

Plus, choosing not to invest in equipment that will be needed about once every few years is just plain stupid and it's asinine to suggest that makes any sense from a business standpoint, even considering the nerd-rage over launch- and patch-day failure.

As stupid and asinine as tying single player games to an online server? Then being surprised when the people that bought it actually try to play it? Then having it take down other, totally unrelated games being played by people that didn't even buy the game that caused the problem in the first place? -.-

Hate to break it to you, but Blizzard is owned by Activision, which is run by the Bobby Kotick who (depending on who you ask) is either an asshole who hates modern gamers, or just money-hungry, and regardless of which it is, he's not about to OK the acquisition of equipment that won't be making him money on a constant basis.

Blizzard operates independently of Activision. They wouldn't fuck with the cash cow. Though you're certainly correct about Kotick being an asshole and it wouldn't surprise me if he's pushing for these "innovations" since the merger.

But the reasoning behind why the bad service occurs does not excuse the bad service.

Honestly, it doesn't matter how high the rage over the server and bug problems were because both problems don't exist now, and haven't for days, and 99% of the people who were whining about it on Tuesday can't be arsed to give a shit today because they're too busy playing and having a hell of a time with the game.

Cept its spurned a big discussion in the gaming community and industry over the direction of gaming and how long before the industry collapses under its own weight because of it. Other than that though, perfectly fine. ;p

[Andara Bledin]

Is it so hard to admit Blizzard isn't perfect?

I'm sorry, when did I ever claim they were? And if I didn't, then who are you responding to while quoting me?

They know full well their servers will fail on a launch day.

This does not necessarily mean this:

They suck at the server side of things.

The vast majority of the time their server setup runs without error.

Plus, choosing not to invest in equipment that will be needed about once every few years is just plain stupid and it's asinine to suggest that makes any sense from a business standpoint, even considering the nerd-rage over launch- and patch-day failure.

Why can't one of the supposed best game studios in the world do it? Especially one that is its own publisher and thus not bound to getting something out the door by a specific date.

Hate to break it to you, but Blizzard is owned by Activision, which is run by the Bobby Kotick who (depending on who you ask) is either an asshole who hates modern gamers, or just money-hungry, and regardless of which it is, he's not about to OK the acquisition of equipment that won't be making him money on a constant basis.

Honestly, it doesn't matter how high the rage over the server and bug problems were because both problems don't exist now, and haven't for days, and 99% of the people who were whining about it on Tuesday can't be arsed to give a shit today because they're too busy playing and having a hell of a time with the game.

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[Gravekeeper]

Seriously, is it really so hard to just admit that launch day should be viewed as the final stress test instead of an actual live game day? So you don't get to play HotGameX for one more day. In the grand scheme of things; who cares?

Is it so hard to admit Blizzard isn't perfect? They know full well their servers will fail on a launch day. They know what their sales are like. Hell, they fail on patch days. They fail on maintenance days. They've been failing at this on and off for years. They suck at the server side of things. Other online games have pulled off successful launch days without being down all day or fucking over people with game ending bugs that block them out of their account entirely and, as lordlunder just pointed out, block them out of EVERY game they own from the same company. Shit like that should have been caught long ago.

Why can't one of the supposed best game studios in the world do it? Especially one that is its own publisher and thus not bound to getting something out the door by a specific date.

I, personally, like playing games and am not going to let my idealism get in the way of accepting the reality of limited resources and the fun I have playing, warts and all.

This is not about idealism. Its about customer service. I don't know why you can't understand that. The game's industry is moving in a direction that is fucking the consumer ever deeper and people such as yourself are just rolling over and saying oh well, its okay, its to be expected.

No its not. If this were any other type of product aside from a game, people would dragging Blizzard into court and said court would be telling Blizzard to get their shit together or start refunding people. The fact that anyone finds this level of "service" acceptable, let alone the norm, is an appalling trend in the industry and is just going to let the industry keep pulling shit like this on the consumer.

[Andara Bledin]

A lot of piracy nowadays comes from the outdated distributer model that divides the world into regions. When a product has a worldwide audience, staggered regional distribution encourages those who can't get it locally to try other means.

This is a supply chain issue, and it would be nice to see the old guard evolving to embrace the fact that we've got an essentially global economy when speaking of anything that can be traded digitally.

Artificial barriers to procurement are, as with any other artificial barrier, counter-productive when your goal is to sell as many copies of the product as possible.

There are quite a number of games that are accelerating globalization with regional language adaptations in the effort to provide supply to traditionally underserved markets. Once supply actually exists, the incidences of piracy will drop to a fraction. As many a "pay what you want, including nothing" offering has shown, people will, in the aggregate, often pay more when given a choice than the standard one-price model.

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[El Pollo Guerrera]

This.

There are literally thousands of movies sitting in storage in basements because studios are so focused on the big money hits that they can't figure out that the nickel and dime returns on material that costs almost nothing to distribute would add up to quite a considerable sum very quickly.

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One has started to figure this out. Warner Archive lets you order old and out-of-print movies on DVD that wouldn't normally see a wide release. Shame that none of the other studios have started in on this (that I know of).

[Jetfire]

Yeah, when EQ (and EQ2 and pretty much any MMO) has a patch day, especially a bad patch day when an exploit is discovered, the playerbase tends to go up at arms over it, not realizing it that they (the players) do as much in one hour after server up as the tester teams can accomplish with a week of testing over time.

Back to the OP, "piracy" in general will always remain a problem. But adding more barriers to the product and to the Networks (Internet) is just alienating the people you're trying to sell to in the first place. And people are starting to react badly to those attempts.

Part of the solution IMO is to take a more global look. A lot of piracy nowadays comes from the outdated distributer model that divides the world into regions. When a product has a worldwide audience, staggered regional distribution encourages those who can't get it locally to try other means. The Game environment (with Steam for example) is starting to evolve past this, but Music, Movies, TV and Literature still have a long way to go. (Music and Literature are further along than TV and Movies, probably because they are hit so hard by the digital networks).

I've mentioned it before, but as a Canadian, these artificial limitations tend to be especially frustrating. Our cable systems have many of the basic US networks available (The Big 4, TBS, WGN, etc...). While a lot of the shows also air on Canadian networks, some of them don't. But even though they do air up here, we don't have access to those exact same shows online. Hulu and Amazon isn't available up here, Netflix's library is a shadow of it's US self, and all the US network sites are geo locked against us. (and a lot of the Canadian networks that may have the rights to US shows sometimes don't get the Net rights. ) Frustrations like that encourage people to seek other means to see something at the same time as their friends who live in other countries. (And don't get me started on what happens when a show airs only in one area but only partly aired or never airs elsewhere).

The production and distribution companies have to change their models, to take a more global, or at least a more digital view of the world and sell accordingly. One way or another it will change eventually; but there's going to be a lot more fighting along the way as systems are modernized.

[Nekojin]

As for bugs, let me take a page from Nekojin: "The player base gets more aggregate playtime in an hour than the entire beta team." Seriously, the wide beta only included up to the first mini-boss, so it's not surprising that there are a lot of issues still in the code. It's just not feasible to get the rigorous testing that would be required to find all of even what seem to be obvious problems.

I did an analysis back when I played Magic: The Gathering. With each new release of the game, some new, broken combination of cards became an "instant win button" of sorts, and players would carry on about how they should playtest more. But they're just not realizing the scale we're talking about.

For Magic, they had a playtest team of 20 people, and they playtested for 6 months of 8-hour shifts.
That works out to 20 (people) x 23 (work days per month) x 6 (months) x 8 (hours per work day), or 22,080 playtest hours. The 100,000+ Magic players do as much aggregate playtesting in 12 minutes as the playtest team did in 6 months, and then they branch out to finding new ways to break the game.

The math is a little bit different for Diablo 3, but not significantly. Even the open playtest weekend was a tiny, tiny fragment of the entire post-launch D3 player base, and the "testing" that happens in a live environment completely dwarfs the pre-launch playtesting.

[Andara Bledin]

Blizzard knows full well their servers aren't up to the job. They've consistently failed in this regard for years but their fans keep giving them a pass for it. They know their servers can't handle it and they do nothing to fix it.

That pass might have something to do with the fact that there's no point in demanding that a company lose money to solve a problem that (aside from lingering nerd-rage) solves itself. Economics just doesn't work like that and some of us prefer to be realists and save the angst. It's a lot more practical to just set the calendar off one day than to flip your shit every time launch day goes down in flames (which it does for every single online title ever).

Seriously, is it really so hard to just admit that launch day should be viewed as the final stress test instead of an actual live game day? So you don't get to play HotGameX for one more day. In the grand scheme of things; who cares?

As for bugs, let me take a page from Nekojin: "The player base gets more aggregate playtime in an hour than the entire beta team." Seriously, the wide beta only included up to the first mini-boss, so it's not surprising that there are a lot of issues still in the code. It's just not feasible to get the rigorous testing that would be required to find all of even what seem to be obvious problems.

I, personally, like playing games and am not going to let my idealism get in the way of accepting the reality of limited resources and the fun I have playing, warts and all.

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[lordlundar]

Hell, there was one where if you tried to trade an equipped shield you got booted out of the game and your character was permanently inaccessible.

Not sure if you heard the full issue about that GK. Not only does that bug block you from your D3 game, but the Battle.net account totally. That means if you have WoW or SC2 you can't play those either.

[Gravekeeper]

Whether you agree with it or not still doesn't change the fact that they made it a multi-player game only. Sure, you can lock people out and play solo, but it's still designed as a multi-player game.

Yes, after the first two were singleplayer with a multiplayer option. The third has nothing about it that requires multiplayer. Its still a single player game, they just added Barrens chat to it. If they had called it Diablo Online instead of Diablo 3 they might have been cut some slack.

And, having been playing with zero issues for all four days it's been out, now, I really don't see any "collossal fuck up."

"I didn't have a problem so the problem doesn't exist"? Seriously? ><

Half the Internet and every gaming site was in an uproar while D3's review ratings went down in flames on every site that allowed user reviews. They even tore it down on Amazon. Its managed to hit every major news outlet from MSNBC to Time magazine. Hell, even Christian Science Monitor ran a story on the clusterfuck that was launch day.

They were unprepared server side for the release of one of their own titles. Again. The fact it was a singleplayer game forced to go online only just made it all the more bitter.

Sure, the systems couldn't handle the strain of millions of people hitting the log-in servers at once. But that's to be expected.

No. They created a product and a service, which was suppose to be available on x date and y time. It was not. That is their fault and their responsibility. It also wasn't just server strain. It was a series of crippling bugs both in the network and the game that they apparently missed in their QA. There were even people that literally got locked out indefinately because of gamebreaking bugs. Hell, there was one where if you tried to trade an equipped shield you got booted out of the game and your character was permanently inaccessible.

Blizzard knows full well their servers aren't up to the job. They've consistently failed in this regard for years but their fans keep giving them a pass for it. They know their servers can't handle it and they do nothing to fix it. Any other company would get sunk by this sort of incompetence. But Actilizzard is huge and its fans rabid. It can apparently do no wrong in their eyes.

Having server outages that last all day on a launch day is unacceptable. Especially for a game that does not require multiplayer.

This has pretty much become Blizzard's MO at this point though.

Cold hard economics says "tough shit."

Yeah, it does. Hence Blizzard's net income is down 42% since last year. ;p

[Andara Bledin]

And I'm honestly getting sick of people defending what was a collossal fuck up and a poor design descision from a company that *should* know better.

Whether you agree with it or not still doesn't change the fact that they made it a multi-player game only. Sure, you can lock people out and play solo, but it's still designed as a multi-player game.

And, having been playing with zero issues for all four days it's been out, now, I really don't see any "collossal fuck up."

Sure, the systems couldn't handle the strain of millions of people hitting the log-in servers at once. But that's to be expected. They could shell out ton of money to avoid that, but they've got shareholders to answer to, and they have rather a lot more clout than a few thousand rabid fans who'll forget all about it when things even out, and a few thousand more who won't forget and won't buy it and won't even come close to the cost of the additional power that would have been required on launch day.

Why the hell does nobody ever do the math when it comes time to piss and moan about servers going down on launch day? Even if all of the bitchers actually boycotted the game (which will never happen), that would still be a pittance compared to the costs that would be incurred to secure a set-up that would appease them.

Cold hard economics says "tough shit."

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[Gravekeeper]

And I think that Gabe Newell's quote is half-right. It is both a service problem and a pricing problem, and neither is 100% fixable. Some people (mostly teens and preteens) pirate because they just don't have the money to get the games they want to play, and what little money they do have goes to other things.

Not being able to afford a luxury item is not a legitimate excuse to steal it though. An explaination, sure, an excuse, no. Also for the record, Gabe and Steam have done tremendously well by tackling both the service *and* pricing.

With a virtual service, games actually deppreciate in value in real time. This rarely occurs with physical retailers. Especially when it comes to gaming as the typical retailer is utterly clueless as to what games are good, which are crap and which are old. The Futureshop near me place still sells copies of Tabula Rasa even though its servers shut down years ago. >.>

Ok, I'm actually playing D3, and am getting really sick and tired of people talking about it being a single player or stand alone game. It's not.

It's a multi-player online game that is capable of being played solo. And the reason for that has to do with the fact that they have real money trading for their auction house so they have to keep all of the item and character resources stored server-side so that it's pretty much impossible for someone to hack the system to essentially steal money.

And I'm honestly getting sick of people defending what was a collossal fuck up and a poor design descision from a company that *should* know better. Yet has been failing in the exact same manner year after year after year. But has such a rabidly loyal fanbase that they can never admit when Blizzard makes a mistake. ;p

Especially when right out of the gate they prove exactly why such a game design is a horrible idea. Something they should have learned from Ubisoft's DRM fiasco. Also, the auction house is a deplorable cash grab and using that as the reasoning behind an awful DRM makes everything even worse.

[Hyena Dandy]

I think that the companies don't understand the ability of crowdsourcing. Which is basically what piracy is. You probably won't get one person who can break all the parts of your game. But you might get one who can break one, another who can break another...

Eventually, the pirates put it out. And not only do they put out the same thing, for free, they do it without all the inconveniences that your DRM put in.

[Andara Bledin]

Brad Wardell over at Stardock believes that the key is to offer a superior experience to customers than non-customers. To that end, they try to keep offering updates, patches, and releases to those who have registered.

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