Why Is Diablo 3 An Online Mode?

[jbombard]

There's obviously going to be maintenance. That's unavoidable, but Blizzard has learned a lot from WoW, and I doubt maintenance is going to be an issue. Maybe the first month but after that I expect it to lower down to WoW standards. Also I don't think Diablo 3 needs the same amount of maintenance as WoW does.

I hope they didn't learn too much from WoW, because WoW maintenance is a bit ridiculous really. Compared to a game like Rift that has pretty much zero maintenance, I don't see how WoW should take as long as it does and as often as it does. Diablo is not WoW and diablo has a significant solo component to it, frankly requiring someone who wants to play a solo game solo to be connected to a service with so much down time is kinda silly.

[BenBos]

There's obviously going to be maintenance. That's unavoidable, but Blizzard has learned a lot from WoW, and I doubt maintenance is going to be an issue. Maybe the first month but after that I expect it to lower down to WoW standards. Also I don't think Diablo 3 needs the same amount of maintenance as WoW does.

With the real money involved, the 500K+ players accessing one server structure and the different AH's, the possible breeches in security, hacking attempts and cracking efforts to break the game system and stats, the monitoring tools that constantly need to be adapted against all the above ... ?

I am sure it will have at least 6 hours of downtime once a week.

[Cairhiin]

With the real money involved, the 500K+ players accessing one server structure and the different AH's, the possible breeches in security, hacking attempts and cracking efforts to break the game system and stats, the monitoring tools that constantly need to be adapted against all the above ... ?

I am sure it will have at least 6 hours of downtime once a week.

You are right about that but WoW is a much larger and much more complex game. There will be maintenance but I don't think it's going to be as bad as WoW was in the early years.

[jbombard]

With the real money involved, the 500K+ players accessing one server structure and the different AH's, the possible breeches in security, hacking attempts and cracking efforts to break the game system and stats, the monitoring tools that constantly need to be adapted against all the above ... ?

I am sure it will have at least 6 hours of downtime once a week.

Personally I hope they keep the AH servers separate from the game servers and allow them to be maintained separately. I mean you should be able to play the game even if the AH was down.