Blizzard was quick to clamp down on the unethical practice
Unethical practice..... it's a video game ffs, you coded a buggy game and are now trying to guilt people for using said bug by claiming their actions are unethical... let's look at how ethical your company is hey blizzard?
Glass houses and whatnot.
I'm glad I've never given blizzard a cent of my money.
This is the absolute worst thing to come out of the "free to play"/"pay to win" genre of games. "Our game is full of bugs? No, it's the children that are wrong."
I despise companies that pull bullshit like this. Yes, it is obviously an exploit. Yes, it is breaking the game. However, Blizzard, YOU RELEASED THE BROKEN BULLSHIT. This isn't some freeware title hoping to eek by on a donation. This is a multi billion dollar company that has had years of development to get this shit right. Fuck you, Blizzard. I'm glad I didn't pay for your shit, and I will continue with that trend into the foreseeable future. Dump some of your capital into QA instead of CEO wallets. Companies shouldn't be able to ban someone from playing something that they paid for, unless explicitly stated in the EULA, and a generic clause about "exploits" isn't explicit.
You've missed the point. I don't want them to list every potential bug. I know that isn't possible. What I want is to not have this knee-jerk ban reaction because someone found a bug and used it to their advantage. As far as I'm concerned, until something is said to the community about a particular bug, the game is working as intended, and the onus is on the company to sort it out. That's like if you bought a ticket to Disney, went inside, went to restaurant, ordered your meal, and a disgruntled employee told you, "No charge," and let you walk off without paying. You think Disney should ban someone because they accepted a free lunch after paying $60 to enter the park? No. They should fire the employee, which, in this analogy, means fixing the bug.
Ridiculous for single player games, this is what I see D4 as primarily. People should be able to do whatever they want and exploit whatever. Mark their save as modded, exclude them from rankings and PvP and call it a day. But companies don't want that, because it would potentially hurt their nasty IAP schemes.
I also don't have much sympathy for the victims, because they bought a product from a well known awful company.
transfer non-seasonal items to a seasonal character.
I haven't been following Diablo 4, could somebody explain this bit? The article doesn't explain why transferring items is so disruptive, or what seasonal and non-seasonal items are.
So, Diablo has two "realms" in which characters can be in, the seasonal realm being one of these. As the name suggests, the seasonal realm is where seasonal characters play through seasons, which are periods of time in which players attempt to complete multiple levels of increasingly difficult challenges. Playing the seasons can earn a player rewards, both free and paid, through the battle pass, which unlocks these rewards based partly on seasonal progress. Seasonal characters are created new at the beginning of the season, and transfer to the other realm, eternal, at season end, where they persist.
Being that there are paid rewards, I can understand and support Blizzard's reaction. Allowing players to exploit a paid service, even in a way that seemingly doesn't effect others, sets a poor precident. Beyond that, I'm not sure if there are ways in which it effects me, but I've not participated in much PVP, which I think would be the most obvious advantage, as otherwise we're not competing.
I don't have 4, but if it's like 3 then there are regular characters who can die and are persistent, then there are seasonal characters who can die but may only be created at the beginning of, and are deleted at the end of, a given season.
Then there's hardcore, who are persistent forever but can only die one time. All three have their own ecosystems in which characters created in a given mode can share gold, certain upgrades, and items with each other, but not outside of their own mode. You can have multiple hardcore characters share items and gold, but you can't give those to regular or seasonal characters, and so on.
I'm not surprised to see this at all. Blizzard has always been pretty protective of their in-game economies, and this exploit flooded the seasonal realm with a ton of gold that shouldn't have been there. Anybody who tried this should have 100% expected to get banned.
Rollbacks with live service games generally don't go over well with the players, especially the ones who did nothing wrong in the first place.
The problem with doing a rollback is that, unless you want to spend a lot of time fixing the things the rollback breaks, you have to roll EVERYTHING on the server back. This means all players will have progress reset and items lost. More players are likely to quit the game than Blizzard will lose by banning a few cheaters.
It sounds like you needed to log one character into the wrong server and disconnect/reconnect the internet at the right time, so it seems pretty unlikely anybody banned actually did this unintentionally.
There isn't really much need to rollback every innocent player if the exploited stuff is relatively traceable.
I'm glad I ditched this dumpster fire early on as soon as I got a satisfying amount of hours played. Definitely the last time blizzard will see my money, at least on the Diablo franchise.
Jaysis. Just stop buying these exploitative and morally bankrupt games. No "at least on the X franchise". No "I won't pay any microtransactions". No "I won't preorder".
They will not change, nor get better as long as they're selling.
In games like Diablo and Path of Exile the game is separated into two ways of playing. You can do "seasonal" or "league" play where it starts at one point, ends at another, and anything you collect during that time is either totally wiped at the end of the season/league. The other way you can play is with permanent characters. In PoE it's called "standard" but I don't know what Diablo calls it. Standard is where all of your stuff from every league/season lives. Once the league is done, your stuff goes there to live on forever. Super neat, since it gives you a long time to accumulate crazy gear.
This bug allowed people to take items from that permanent standard league and put them in the inventory of a seasonal character. This could conceivably allow someone that's leveling to have top-tier leveling items, or very high level endgame gear very early on in the season, which is competitive.
It's clear cheating, a broken-ass exploit, players have ALWAYS been banned for exploiting bugs like this (throughout the history of competitive online gaming, not just in ARPGs like D4 and PoE), and absolutely nobody that's anywhere near reasonable has an issue with bans being handed out for cheating and exploiting bugs.
This kind of bug pops up fairly regularly in every game that works like this and those acting super butthurt about it likely got banned for exploiting it and won't admit it publicly.
You're free to do what you want, but I for one will not be supporting them based on their monetization strategies and anti-consumer practices.
Blizzard just has to be like Larian, release a feature complete singleplayer game with the ability to play multiplayer, it's that easy. No need for battlepasses, or $30 skins, no need for always online drm.
These are terrible business practices born of greed and hubris that need to die.