Whack-a-mole for the win.

Funny story... Google (without quotes) "diablo 3 expansion sales".

And to think that people hate on Riot Games for not *replying* to threads as often as they'd like...

Path of Exile: Another game I'd own and play the hell out of (probably) if they'd actually release it for purchase, instead of that stupid f2p/microtransactional/can only play online BS. AKA DRM.


Which also makes me wonder when the hell Torchlight 2 will have a DRM-free release, because I rather enjoyed Torchlight 1.

I'm about to give this a shot now. Weird timing, I was downloading when you posted this. I forget where I heard about it first. I was Googling kind of hard for alternatives.

Grim Dawn is shaping up, but I burned out on Beta 9 or something and won't be back for a while.
Yeah, online-only is great for MOBAs, but a little suffocating for games with strong PvE modes. Moar latencies plz!

I don't give a crap about PvP. All I ask is to be able to opt out of it. Party dungeon raids might be cool, idk, but I don't necessarily want to risk a run-in with Joe Internet User for it.

Also, trying to find an unused character name you can live with. Ugh.

This thread makes me want to replay Titan Quest. Sadly the various skill choices never properly got balanced. I wonder if there are any good mods?

Grim Dawn is shaping up fairly well so far and they just rolled out the first edition of Act II in early access.

I don't know about mods. I know there were a lot of redone masteries, but I don't think the TQ forums ever got together and rallied around a direction for a sweeping balance patch.
Zing!

I've known the same joke for years, only it was a generic IT guy instead of a MS one, and his advice was "let's all get down of the car and back on, the car should be fixed then"

Then I tried it out in real life. Turns out, jokes give very bad mechanical advice, and the result wasn't pretty.

Plot twist: the Original Post wasn't the joke, the Original Poster was!

Thanks for reminding me to preorder the deluxe edition of the expansion, I've been putting this off long enough...

The SC2 campaign is pretty decent. It's definitely enjoyable, and this is coming from someone who is not a huge fan of RTS games.

But yes, i also dislike the fact that you have to be extremely fast when micromanaging stuff, which is way i don't play multiplayer (i get my ass owned every single time). It's not fun when you can't possibly win, and i've already given up on trying to get decent at SC2 online. The campaign is still fun, though, even for a SC2 noob like me.
I tolerate non-intrusive DRM like Steam. I can even tolerate the annoying Tages and SecuROM, but always-online is too much for me. I still regret purchasing D3 and helping to fund always-online games.

Steam is sort of tolerable, but it's also a chunk of self-important harassware that slows my computer startup and asks me to verify my email every month.

I started out not being a huge anti-DRM person. Originally, I viewed it as a bit of a perk. There were a lot of fairly old and cheap games here, and eventually it became a place I kept an eye on.

Blizzard taught me how to hate DRM, I guess. Getting banned from battle.net for wanting to run your game in a window is shit. Buying a second copy of D2 Battle Chest so you can mule for yourself with a custom D2 launcher is shit. They're still charging 30 bucks for Battle Chest and moving lots of copies, and they can't be bothered to patch in a shared stash into the game. No, you have to trust some stranger and the servers and the internet connection and hope that your item is still there when you log back in. Or you have to phone up a buddy and get them to open the game, or... something really stupid involving two computers. Diablo 2 finally got a windowed mode some time back, but a simple HD remake? They can't be fucking bothered, even though it would sell. In their analysis, the money they'd lose from people buying that instead of their brand new overproduced trash would probably outweigh the benefit.

I mean, look at the RMAH. That wound in particular is healed, but the game still sucks in other ways they haven't addressed yet. But basically, some idiot in a suit got butthurt that someone, somewhere was making money off of his games and he wasn't getting a cut.

Steam is annoying. I made the mistake of buying Civ 5 on my Steam account because my wife wanted to play it, and now I'm never seeing the end of login/logout woes.

Non-DRM isn't just a bonus to me anymore. These days, the presence of DRM sets the bar at, "it had better be fucking worth it". I'm pretty sad that The Walking Dead hasn't shown up here yet. From what I hear, I'm missing out. :(

If we lived in a world where more people shunned DRM to the point where the lost sales due to disgust drarfed the lost sales due to piracy in all but mega-AAA titles, I'm not sure that it would have a future. It's such a waste of development efforts. Unfortunately, there's probably some kind of critical mass. If you know that every gamer at your HS is getting the new game, then it's a no brainer to go hang out after school and put it on your flash drive or whatever and have a pirate party. People are going to buy Bio Shock Infinite with DRM no matter what. I probably won't anytime soon, but whatever.

Protip: Set it to not start on startup. ;-)

I run it only if I want and I am happier that way. It doesn't slow my PC until I need to use it.

I have a lot of things to still do in TL2 and PoE .... I have really no reason at all to give another (a fourth) try at D3. I really think they killed the franchise (or .... the Diablo dynasty got mutated beyond ... anything good, I am not sure how to say it. ).
On the other hand, I never had any 'stats' on D3 even though I always wanted to know the initial / still active monthly /weekly amounts of players .... anyone knows where I can find something about it ?

The current patch is a big sweetheart bribe. Most skills have been buffed to 2-3x damage. There's a promotional 50% exp boost. Loot now knows what stats it's supposed to have and gives them to you. You now get legendaries every 1-2 hours.

It's a big massive bribe, and a lot of people are taking the bait. The worst part is that I don't know whether to hope they're slowly starting to learn their first of many lessons, or if I should hope that they hilariously nerf it all into the abyss over the next few months for the sake of "pvp balance" when really what they'll be doing is giving in to career D3 power grindiers who will inevitably get butthurt that too many "casual" gamers are able to play with the same toys as them.

I had the occasion to watch the comparative video of the console D3 and the PC one (by gamespot I think). This is one of the most ludicrous thing I watched (videogames related). I really hated the PC version for the 'buy your stuff don't loot it", but the exact opposite featured on the console version was bafflingly repulsive. It just finished to convince me neither of these two D3 games was not for me at all.
PoE really saves the genre for me. And TL2 to a lesser extent (way lesser).