Always smart to treat your players like criminals
How else are they going to milk the shit out of an IP running off the success of previous games?
I’ll be interested to see how this game changes under Microsoft in place of Bobby
Diablo 1 had a duplication bug through its final release and no one was ever “actioned” for exploiting it. Let people have fun with the game FFS.
Their entire business model here is to maintain the whales who play at the top 1% level of Great Rifts that spend the most time in the game.
When that’s your business model, you can’t let players get too strong without having to spend a lot of time in the game. Because getting strong is the goal, so the more time you spend, the more invested you get, the more likely you are buying these extra things.
They need to feel stronger than others. So they can justify the time spent. But when everyone can be superman. Well, then no one is superman.
I’m kind of surprised that, given the history of the series, they didn’t make it a point to have atomic transactions.
I mean, it’s not as if it’s an unsolved problem.
EDIT: Not to mention that I’d have kind of thought that games like this would have a UUID attached to each generated item, to help deal with scammers and the like.
I think they have but the exploit probably also generated a new uuid. (I have no idea how they implemented but I believe they can track down all the items. )
I mean, it sounds like this involved trading.
There should be two types of interactions involving an item.
First, when the item is initially-created, like at drop time, maybe loot boxes, that sort of thing. That should create a UUID, if the game uses them.
Second, when an existing item is transferred. But the transfer code shouldn’t involve creating new UUIDs. And the trading code should only be doing item transfers.
And any code transferring an item should be happening only on the server side, and should be atomic.
I could maybe understand someone figuring out some way to get an item to be generated twice, like at drop time.
But duping items when trading means that either probably code authoritative as to world state that shouldn’t be on the client is running on the client, or code that should be atomic isn’t. And for the latter case, I wouldn’t expect the item transfer code to be able to generate new item UUIDs, because it should be running transfer code, not item generation code.
Let people have fun with the game FFS.
Mmmm. It’s fine for single-player games to provide absolute freedom, but can really ruin multiplayer games, particularly competitive multiplayer games.
I only played Diablo briefly. Way back when it was released, late 1990s, they put out a demo. I tried it. Played a bit single-player. Felt kind of grindy and repetitive, lot of clicking on things to kill them. But some party-based games require people working in coordination to be interesting. Figured “well, maybe I can go play with some people”, see if it’s more fun with a team working together.
Logged into a demo server, and as I recall, one couldn’t use single-player characters on servers (which makes sense, if the multiplayer characters need to run in a secure environment). I was not really enthusiastic about the idea of having to grind up a new character to where my other one had been. I doubted it’d work, but decided I’d try memory-editing my gold. Unexpectedly, it did – the server just trusted the client as to quantity of items when they were moved around in the inventory. Huh.
So I filled up every possible slot in my character with the maximum amount of gold possible and went off hunting for a shopkeeper. Some other player on the demo server kept calling for other players to come meet him at some location for various reasons. That sounded sketchy, so I avoided that. It turns out that there were some clever hacks out that would apparently let characters both be invisible to other characters and do enormous damage. Eventually, that character managed to find me, gave me a whack that killed me in one hit, and the screen exploded into an essentially entirely gold-floored mass. That player, probably a little incredulous, walked around a little, then started trying to pick up gold.
It wasn’t as if I’d lost anything that couldn’t be promptly remade, but I decided that given the state of the game, given the frequency with which the game’s rules were being broken – both by me and others – this probably wasn’t the game for me. Last time I’ve played the series.
I agree with not limiting a single-player environment, but you can’t let one character do whatever they want in a multiplayer environment without affecting the experience of other players in the game.
Fuck Blizzard but do they not have an in game economy to maintain? You wouldn’t tell Valve not to patch CS dupe exploits.
Does this game have pvp? I haven’t played any diablo. But if this is just PvE and people can easily remove someone from a group, then I fail to see this as anything other than them milking IAPs. If it has PvP or something then i can understand.
PC Gamer is like “we will let you know when this is fixed”… Since when are they the middle man? Blizzard will tell players when this is fixed. PC Gamer is not even needed in the conversation. :)
Action me harder, daddy
Games that have exploitable bugs will be exploited