Dear Blizzard: Unbork 'Diablo III'

Speaking as an Ubuntu user, I am well aware that the community sees any sort of opportunity to lay claim to oppressed minority status and sprints for it, even when said claims are stupid. Still…as much as it kills me to say this…Linux users are probably right and Blizzard is screwing up Diablo III. Again.

At issue are people playing the game via WINE, the open-source Windows emulator popular on Linux. Scraping away the crap (and whining about how they’re oppressed) on the Battle.Net thread, what it seems to boil down to is that anybody running unsupported hardware or software will either be mistaken for a cheater or booted off the system whenever Blizzard runs a system survey. Others note the exact same thing happened to World of Warcraft a while back and Blizzard issued a mass apology and unban.

This is just yet another in what has been a truly disastrous launch for a modern video game. First it was server crashes constantly when the game was first released, then it was the patch that broke the XP meter and set all your companions back to level 13, immediately followed by restrictions put on players who bought a digital copy and now this. I don’t even play the game and I think this is ridiculous.

Some seem to think that we should just put up with this, but you know what? We shouldn’t. Most of this is triggered not by basic screw-ups but because of Blizzard’s own restrictions. If a game is not an MMO, it does not need to be constantly online. If a feature like the real money auction house has you that scared of fraud, then you never should have implemented it.

So, Blizzard, unbork Diablo III. Remove the always online requirement. Remove the real-money auction house. And let people just play the damn game.

image courtesy Blizzard

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