Diablo III - Major Rollback Issues; Loss of Levels/Gold

@jlyons264 - I don't think many people would complain about not being allowed to use a single player character in a multiplayer environment - that's not how games have historically worked, though that's been changing. There are plenty of times people would like to play a game when an internet connection is unavailable - a negative consumer response to this kind of DRM is hardly new or unjustified.

Like you said, you've been playing MMO's for 14 years. You know the ins and outs of being an MMO consumer, and you're willing to roll with the downsides like not playing a character while problem resolution is occurring. Others aren't so experienced and don't know that rule of thumb, and more importantly, they expect the product to work as advertised, so the fact that such problem resolution has to happen in the first place is enough to get a lot of people ticked, not to mention that there's an unwritten rule about how the player should deal with such an eventuality and players not following it are prone to getting burned.

 

Is it wrong to want to be paid for the software they make? Crysis 2 is reported to be the most stolen game(I will find the report in the morning, going to work). If I remember right it was something like 14 million copies. would you be mad if you was out over 500 million because of pirated copies?

I didn't say I like how the mmo people handle roll backs, it should had been handle much differently. Blizzards customer service is minimal at best, horrible most of the time.

On the same note I don't care how good the server farm is, you throw that many people at it at the same time. Something is going to go wrong. That is just the network person inside me knowing how bad it is with a small farm going on line.

I plan on the worse, and hope for the best with game roll outs like this or any other mmo. They all have had hickups in the first couple weeks with load balance issues.

 

Piracy is a problem to be sure, and revenue is lost to it, but 14 million pirated copies of a game doesn't translate to half a billion dollars in lost revenue - it translates to a lot of people playing a game they wouldn't have played if it cost them money, some people who would have bought the game on sale not paying, and some people who would have paid full price not paying. It's not a drop in the bucket, but it's not half a billion dollars in lost revenue either - for the absolute biggest, most pirated games, I'd estimate actual lost revenue is probably well south of $100 million - a lot of money, no doubt, but calling it half a billion is rather melodramatic.

As for the CS issues, maybe it just comes down to the old phrase, "caveat emptor". It sucks and the customer is right to complain, but there's only so much that can be done on either end.

 

No, it isn't wrong. But when a particular form of DRM becomes so intrusive to actually prevent people from playing a game, then it becomes a problem. There are quite a few ways this game could have been redesigned to severely reduce the server loads while only introducing a minimal risk of cheats, pirates, and item dup bugs. Not to mention redesign the always-on-DRM connection system so that the game doesn't just drop you out midway through an act even if their servers go down for a time.

It's also false to assume that every pirated copy equals a sale -- some of those people simply would never have paid for the game. But that isn't the big point of my post.

 

Just reading the rollback stories made me remember how devastated I was in my childhood when my game saves decided to corrupt themselves for no good reason.

Was there any news of Blizzard holding back on server costs?

 

I still find it amusing how the OP STILL decides to argue about this despite my point.

If you agree to the Terms and Conditions, A.K.A. End-User Licensed Agreement (EULA), and DON'T read it, then you have no idea if you've actually got any beef with that company. I'm not a fanboy and you accusing me of being one is hilarious because I told you to "read the EULA and stop whining."

The EULA is what gives them the ability to do what they need to do without fear of a lawsuit and to go about their daily regime unhindered. With the amount of time and effort you're putting into this thread, you could have actually read the EULA by now and found out exactly what points in the agreement did they just utilize.

As far as I can see, you haven't done much more than complain and kick and scream about your SINGLE PLAYER GAME.

Personally I find it really, really funny to watch people like you kick and scream and whine about these problems. Mind you it's about a game that was released less than 7 days ago. Be patient and wait for them to fix the problems. If you can't be patient, then stop playing and don't complain anymore. No one really wants to hear this.

 

EULA's/ToS's are a joke. It's just the devs/pubs way of saying they don't take responsibility for anything. Everyone points at them as if they are LAW. They are nothing but writing that has no substance. It's just what the company does to protect themselves, but doesn't excuse their poor CS or performance issues, and not sure how reading the EULA would cover that anyhow.

An hour's worth of legal speak for a $60 *GAME*?

 

Seems to me that since its Blizzard, gamers think its ok to drop the ball on a huge AAA game like Diablo 3.
And if i had bought it then i would be very angry if my shiny new 60 euro game did not work as expected.
Same thing happened with BF3 at release too, and i was not very happy about that.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

 

True, it's not worth complaining about. Even if you would go ahead, though, it won't matter - you'll lose in the end


Yes, it's pretty pointless to keep complaining about Blizzard. Most of you know what it means nowadays to get a game that has just been released... So you can chose to live with it or not, if you do get the game. No use ing 24/7.

 

You knew this was going to happen. So don't buy it, wait. The market is what people make.

 

Thats been my joke about it this whole time, while I am light hearted about it I am serious at the same time. $60 is the most expensive computer game I ever bought (well $100 in my case for the collectors edition) they knew full well how popular this game was and how many people had purchased it so they should have been better prepared for the server load.

Blizzard .... SC2 and WoW probably the two largest online games in the world they should be no stranger to doing this online thing right and they have no lack of funds or backing to pool together the resources necessary.

D3 should be a rather light netcode if done proper but no matter what there codes weight is they should have had servers ready to support it.

 

I am glad you are light hearted about it. Ironically my disconnects wasn't from the servers, I been loosing packets at one of their switches. I lost just enough to disconnect me.

I am mad that I have been rolled back, but I am also not playing a while before I feel they get the roll backs to stop.

 

This launch hasn't been smooth by any means, but how many people have had rollback issues where they've actually lost items or gold or levels, not just been sent back to the start of an area? I'm willing to bet it's not many, in fact Voodooi's case is the only one I've seen. There's a lot to criticize here, but it's a little silly to say "whew, glad I didn't buy it, those rollbacks are crazy!"

 

Actually, others in this thread got rolledback too:
1. http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...back-issues-loss-levels-gold.html#post8534906
2. http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...ck-issues-loss-levels-gold-4.html#post8538004

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I googled an executive e-mail, sent it off and got this as a reply:
http://i.imgur.com/y0wXu.png

It fixes half of the issue, but it's better than nothing (I'm still short 8 levels and 180k~ gold due to the incompetent GM).

To the ignorant posters like imglidinhere who were spamming "L2READ TOS", notice in the screenshot, Blizzard admits the GM failed to follow proper procedures (it had nothing to do with TOS/EULA). If I would of simply given up, I would of gotten nothing. I can't believe some of the people defending rollbacks and lousy support. It's pretty pathetic that a customer has to contact an executive to get a problem resolved.

 

I still don't think it's a widespread issue, but it is unfortunate if you're the one it happens to and they should have handled it better.

 

Sadly, those who post about it in Blizzard's technical support forums have their post deleted. If you google the issue and head to the posts on Blizzard's boards, you will get a message "This topic has been deleted" (something in that nature), which is what happened to me. They don't want bad publicity.

 

In case you guys haven't heard, Diablo 3 accounts *correction, characters* have been hacked and its pretty widespread. Avoid playing in public games or you might log back in naked with no items and the best blizzard can do? Offer you a roll back to a previous save of which you only get twice a year, threaten to ban you from the real money auction house, and on average you'll lose a day or two of progress. Authenticators don't work as it appears to take items only from the character you were playing on, not every character tied to your account.

Sadly none of this is shocking. Play StarCraft 2 matchmaking for an hour and your bound to run into multiple maphackers using the same hack that has been out for 6 months. Same battle.net, same security holes, same blizzard doing near nothing besides striking down posts like a mad french revolutionary manning the guillotine.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5271779230

Also OP it looks like your not alone bro :\

 

I'm surprised they haven't deleted all those threads to hide the truth like they have with mine and many others. Good find

Instead of recovering mine to its original state (only partially), they gave me 30 days of free WoW as compensation - a game that I haven't played in over a year and do not want to ever play.

 

Yeah, im waiting for a sale or something.
Probably going to take a while but i can wait.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

 

Where's Lieto? He assured me battle.net was hack/cheat free...

Pretty much everything I predicted about D3 has come true, especially regarding the people of battle.net and the absolute loss that was the abandonment of non-battle.net multiplayer.

At this point, I do not care about the now corrupted AH, the insecure and pointless RMAH, or the absolute rotten sewer that battle.net has become.

I want to enjoy Diablo 3. (even with it's flaws)
Having the threat of getting any character you log in stripped regardless of personal security is kinda hurting that concept.

(FYI according to those reporting it, there is no defense except being one of the masses and they haven't gotten to you yet... it doesn't matter if you have 26-character-randomly-generated password, authenticators aplenty, never play in co-op games, or are only level 10. Any character you log in and anything that character can touch including stash is vulnerable.)

 

hah, one more reason to wait it out.

 

Or it is a known bug? WoW forums will delete new post if they directly relate to an issue covered in other popular post or sticky.

 

I guess Blizzard now should implement offline mode.

Come on, make it happen.

 

Offline mode is never going to happen. Duping was a huge problem with D2 due to client side tracking.

 

I wonder how much more of this kind of crap people are going to take before they take em to court over the release of a broken a product.

 

Ok, this is all really crappy, but seriously, what are you going to sue them for?

 

It's not just them. Most PC games that have come out over the last couple of years have been broken (IE non-funtional). Bethesda games are notoriously broken, TOR was offline for a while, D3, the list goes on and on. None of the dev's are taking responsibility for the half...butt (?) products they keep pushing out.

 

But the hacking is even worst,right?

 

lol my thoughts exactly

 

The hacking is bad, but introducing a feature that they've been against since the beginning and won't actually fix the hacking problem with the battle.net side is just dumb and won't happen.

 

So who are you going to sue? Mr. John Q. Videogames for releasing broken videogames? Vote with your wallet.

 

LOL I'm not going to do anything, if anyone gets something off the ground - sure I might contribute. I'm personally getting sick of buying a game and not being able to play it for X amount of days because it's broken.

 

I'm sad then.

 

Well I hope they make an offline version of Diablo 3 with extended ACTS. I'll buy it.

 

Don't hold your breath.

 

As of right now, I think it works well. I don't see them getting sued over something they fixed over the course of a few days.

Not gonna happen - maybe look towards torchlight / torchlight 2 for a modern single player diablo experience.

 

To be fair, PC games have been released buggy for a long time now. Even when the internet was a very new thing to most households, many games still needed patching to be really playable upon release. Some, like Revenant and Ultima IX, never really got there.

It doesn't justify things, especially when Blizzard did huge betas for Diablo 3 and had a development budget larger than the GDP of some small countries, but it's been going on for a long time.

 

And of course ... they will not roll back any transaction!!

 

Well, if it is not widespread that means that their CS is like a couple of guys, right? Otherwise he would have his issues solved in a matter of hours.

 

I don't understand the point you're making. The complexity of the issue is what it is and will take a certain amount of time to resolve, regardless of how many people it affects.

 

Games have been coming out buggy as soon as they got complex. Where that problem gets exacerbated, I find, is that everything is cross-platform these days. Rolled up in that is the glacial pace of patch validation (or whatever it's termed) on the consoles. Games are also more complex and monolithic than they've ever been, so I suppose that never helps either.

 

The RMAH is going to be a huge mistake for blizzard if they go through with it but its likely they are already realizing this hence the "delays".

With server issues, hacked accounts, rollback, patches, content changes I can see a whole mess of liability on Blizzards part when people start making daily transactions with real money.

Who knows what legal ramifications could follow if things dont go well, I mean Blizzard is going to directly profit off the RMAH so there is going to be some liability on them no matter what their EULA tries to state.

 

First off, you don't need sarcasm quotes around the word 'delays'. That doesn't make any sense.

Second, hacked accounts aren't blizzard's fault. Server issues are going to be less and less of a problem going forward. Sure, it was a mess on Day 0. It's been just over a week and things are stabilizing quite well.

Patches and content changes could make people angry in the future. Something to think about, but probably no legal liability.

Rollbacks could be problematic going forwards. I presume they'll be giving out refunds in some cases if there are problems on Blizzard's end.

 

Wow, my friend just got hacked. Character stripped of everything.

But to be fair, his account was not that secure; he was not using the Authenticator (no smartphone, and he was too busy with the game to order the Authenticator from Blizzard).

1 week of his life down the drain I guess.

 

did he have a good password? was he phished?

 

Even people with authenticators are getting hacked.

As previously mentioned, whenever you join a public game, the hacker in the same party copies the D3 client and once you log out, you're stripped away of everything.

 

I was so on the fence about buying D3. The "always online even for single-player" was the tipping factor, because most of my gaming time is when I am at my in-laws' house where the Internet is unstable.

Blizzard, thanks for making me feel I made the right decision. I'll use the 40€ on Torchlight 2 or Path of Exile.

 

Tapatalk, why you mess up my post.

But i can highly recommend Torchlight 2 based on the beta alone.

 

1. Blizzard has mentioned within the last couple days that not a single individual has contacted them about being hacked that had an authenticator attached.
2. Blizzard has also mentioned that the hacks have absolutely nothing to do with Public Games that has been thrown around by the community.

Diablo® III Post-Launch Update - Forums - Diablo III is the post that mentions the above 2.

 

I'm glad I didn't buy D3 yet. Knew there were going to be mind boggling issues in the beginning at least and there is no need to stress myself over them. I have many other games that can take up my attention right now anyway