Weekend Reading: Diablo 3’s Success and Mandatory Online Connections

I think internet requirement stinks. No way to play on Hugesnet.

I disagree with the assertion that this always-on play doesn't benefit the consumer. The most fun (by far, in my opinion) part of Diablo 3 is how easy it is to play with your friends. You can jump right in, and then instantly teleport right to them...it's beyond easy.

That wouldn't be possible in a pure single-player environment because cheating would a serious problem. This way, your characters are stored on their servers, so it also means there's no risk of loosing your toons if you step away from the game for a while or loose your computer.

Patches that enable player vs. player or player group vs. player group will also benefit from an always-on system.

I'd say their always-on implementation was very smooth overall

While it is true internet in the US sucks so it isn't always reliable, this isn't 1992, everyone has an internet connection...and this wasn't done just to stop all piracy, D3 is a very multiplayer game.

Eric what you write is simply uninformed. Diablo 2 was also very multiplayer-oriented, if you wanted you had the same service as Diablo 3 offers (your character saved on their Bnet servers, easy online multyplayer gaming, strong anti-cheat controls). Yet, if you wanted, you could also play alone and offline with a char saved on your PC.

Its not wrong if Blizzard offers you a cheat-free and functioning online environement, but with diablo 3 they dont offer it, they force you to do it.

Therefore, Blizzard changes nothing in the world of gaming, they just regressed to lazyness. Maybe some companies like Ubisoft will copy their behaviour, yet there will always be some developers with common sense which produce fun-oriented games instead of having their main focus on marketing-campaings and anti-piracy measures.

This behaviour is the whole reason the hypothethically best anti-piracy argument of "damaging the industry" falls flat:
a) you have to assume that they boast about their product in a unrealistic way, they bribe Reviewers or even write online reviews themselves, so to know what game you want to purchase, you NEED to pirate it first (I made the mistake of buying the piece of * BF3 based on reviews).
b) There is no guarantee that the game works without tinkering from your side (well, Blizzard may be an exception here, since their games usually work on almost every system imaginable), and with a online client my version of Titan quest with minor health potion looking like Vampires (due to my Vampire looking like a pot somehow until I changed graphics of the pot to that of the vampire) would not be recognized and therefore also not playable.

I am pretty sure it wont take a long time before a cracked offline-version of diablo 3 shows up, as it was with every game having online requirements, or even cracked servers as it was with WoW.

What they do may seem like a wise choice to someone who is informed only by the propaganda of gaming companies and the anti-piracy * , yet all it does is start a downward spiral towards less options for the users and having long-term fans and modders joining game-piracy. The less options we have, the more likely someone hacks the game. The more often the games get hacked, the less options they give us. Repeat.
I dont openly endorse Piracy, the heck i have even two original Diablo2&ToB's, one for me and one as a "guest account" for friends. But as soon as Piracy is necessairy to have something as simple as a LAN-Party (8 PC's joining Blizzards servers from one connection is just nonsense), if my abilities of playing a game I BOUGHT depends on servers who just cant handle it and are not sure to be still up in... say ten or tewnty years (I still play diablo I from time to time, still having chars with an age of up to fifteen real life years), then all they do is make Piracy legit, wich is as pathethic as it is sad.