Blizzard has announced that it will ban everyone that uses game-modifying software in Diablo 4, including simple mods.
It took some level of self control for me to skip this game but seriously, fuck modern Blizzard. Seeing news like this makes me feel less like I’m missing out.
To be honest, if you wait a year or two (or more) until it’s discounted or even deeply discounted, it’ll probably be more worth it anyway. I.E. compare the clusterfuck that Diablo 3 was at launch to the state it’s in nowadays, which is “pretty good”. Not amazing by any means, but worth the low price it sells for during a sale.
I was in the open betas for Diablo 4 and I have this to say: it’s better than Diablo 3, and has the potential to be good with time. That said, I totally agree with your sentiments. Modern Blizzard is trash. Most of the OG crew have left already. They don’t have the same soul as what they used to have.
Are there many online games that don’t warm against the use of mods in this way? My experience is that they all tend to basically have some version of the “using mods risks a ban” stance.
Yeah, for fairness in online interactions, but most games (used to?) have some kind of single player where modding is ok. As I read this you literally can’t mod the game.
I was tentatively excited to get it before I saw the sheer amount of money grubbing. The existence of Last Epoch, Path of Exile and Grim Dawn made it a lot easier for me.
There seems to be a limit to how large a studio/publisher can get before it keels over into pure and utterly unashamed greed. Shareholders gotta make money I guess.
To give more context, last week, the team behind TurboHUD released a version of this overlay tool/mod for Diablo 4. TurboHUD helps keeping track of your progression, your performance, and allows you to add quality-of-life improvements to the user interface. This mod was also available for Diablo 3, and a lot of gamers were using it.
A UX and progress tracker is getting people banned. How fragile is Blizzard? They’re probably afraid this will somehow give people an unfair advantage for those leaderboards that won’t exist for at least 6 more months.
They are probably afraid of players having any control over the game that they can’t monetize.
I assume its less about what the mods do and how the mods are doing it. It’s an always online game (whether you think this is a bad thing is a separate issue) and there is a PvP component, which means things are going to be more locked down from a mod/cheat perspective.
The article itself says the same thing.
In a way, this does not really surprise us. After all, we’ve been constantly saying that you should be using mods only when playing a game in offline mode. And, since Diablo 4 does not have an offline mode, PC gamers should avoid using even simple mods like TurboHUD.
To be “fair”, given that for better or worse it’s an Always Online game, it’s easier to just say “NO MODS ALLOWED, END OF STORY” than to deal with the hassle of strictly defining what is and isn’t kosher and dealing with the inevitable rules lawyering from people trying to argue how THEIR MOD is special and doesn’t break the rules.
But yeah, f*ck ActiBliz
My decision to boycott these assholes just looks better and better.