The anti-DRM thread

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zink77

Member
Jan 16, 2012
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Complaining about drm is pointless since the battle was won 20 years ago when gamers accepted mmo's which were a total corporate propaganda operation to get people to buy the same PC rpg's with drm and a subscription, as soon as everquest, world of warcraft and guild wars 1 were things and everyone bought them. That told game developers and publishers all they needed to know about gamers.

Complaining about drm 20 years later when valve was the biggest purveyor of walled gardens and everyone went and bought half-life and tf2... I mean come on, it's a little late don't you all think?
 
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SMOGZINN

Lifer
Jun 17, 2005
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Complaining about drm is pointless since the battle was won 20 years ago when gamers accepted mmo's

Once again, since you are a slow learner, MMO's had nothing to do with DRM. MMOs have basically always been a part of gaming, some of the very earliest video games were MUDS, which are basically text based MMO's. The MMO's of today are a direct descendent of those games which were free to play and community created and ran.
 

zink77

Member
Jan 16, 2012
98
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Once again, since you are a slow learner, MMO's had nothing to do with DRM.
'
Except that's where you're wrong... I was there when PC RPG's in development were rebranded mmo's, notice RPG's on the PC slowed to a trickle and guild wars was just rebranded mmo. DRM is any program that is run from a computer that isn't yours.

Let's not forget wow's private servers as scientific evidence against your position:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444122

Now why would blizzard try to shut down private servers? Oh yeah because we used to get dedicated servers and multiplayer inside RPG games until the big push to steal PC RPG's on the PC by rebranding them mmo's and selling them to suckers.

MMO's are just PC RPG's with a marketing moniker. MMO's are not some special class of game, they were the test case to test how stupid the gaming public was and you're proof of this fact.

The reason we have diablo 3 with always online drm is specifically because of pioneering efforts of Ultima online, everquest and wow.

A game is just a computer program, there's no reason for the game to not run 100% on your computer.

Just look at what happened to Team fortress 2, Tribes Ascend, Path of Exile, etc... all those "f2p" games are just another word for DRM locked game you don't own that they are asking for money for.

That's why modding has gone the way of the dodo to a large extent in the AAA space and we no longer get level editors. Just look at what happened to doom 2016... The multiplayer has no dedicated server exe's and they are running the matchmaking from corporate machine or an AWS colo. Either way parts of the games have been taken out of the game to remove more and more control out of your hands.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
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'
they were the test case to test how stupid the gaming public was and you're proof of this fact.

So now instead of insulting gamers everywhere, you're insulting someone on the forum? Classy.

Also, Guild Wars is not an MMO. MMOs are a special class of game. You pile on a server with thousands of other people and play the same game at the same time. Guild Wars barely achieved that, and even then, not really.

If you never saw Dalaran so populated that it would slow your PC to a crawl, then you have no idea what you're talking about. Or Wintergrasp. Heh.
 

zink77

Member
Jan 16, 2012
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Also, Guild Wars is not an MMO. MMOs are a special class of game.

Sigh... the fact that private servers exist for UO and WoW prove your thesis that they are "special class of games" incorrect. All that I needed to demonstrate was that you could run mmo's outside of corporate computers control and save yourself the monthly fee and I did that. Sorry to tell ya. MMO's are just rpg's with drm and a subscription, that's the reality. They were part of the big propaganda push to confuse the public and it worked because you're an example of their propaganda success.
 
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SMOGZINN

Lifer
Jun 17, 2005
14,202
4,401
136
Sigh... the fact that private servers exist for UO and WoW prove your thesis that they are "special class of games" incorrect. All that I needed to demonstrate was that you could run mmo's outside of corporate computers control and save yourself the monthly fee and I did that. Sorry to tell ya. MMO's are just rpg's with drm and a subscription, that's the reality. They were part of the big propaganda push to confuse the public and it worked because you're an example of their propaganda success.

Except of course that you are wrong again, because it proves why the games run as server/client processes instead of single stand alone process on one computer. Your absurd claim boils down to that the only reason to run a client/server processes is to prevent people from 'owning' their programs. That is patently false, as anyone that knows anything about how computers work knows full well.
 

zink77

Member
Jan 16, 2012
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Except of course that you are wrong again, because it proves why the games run as server/client processes instead of single stand alone process on one computer. Your absurd claim boils down to that the only reason to run a client/server processes is to prevent people from 'owning' their programs. That is patently false, as anyone that knows anything about how computers work knows full well.

Man you guys can't read between the lines... in the 90's, games were complete with both single player code and multiplayer code included inside the game, you got client and server inside the same exe. The fact that programs have been divided into two was the scam. Pre high speed internet everywhere online wasn't a thing because it would have hurt sales.

After diablo 2 and Starcraft 1... Diablo 3 was specifically architected the same way wow was as client server for the online drm, vs diablo 2. Note the only difference between the two games is how they are architected.

"MMO" is just a piece of software architected to remove control of software from gamers, that was the whole f'n plan to push recurring revenue (subs) and microtransactions, you can't have mtx without removing game ownership and software control from the customer.

That's reality, everyone arguing different is irrational to an insane degree. Anyone who played quake 3 or UT in the 90's would have never imagined 20 years later we'd have F2P quake champions with no modding, no level editor, no sdk's. Or doom 2016 with no map editors, tools nor mods.

All that went away because of the rise of stupid people getting internet and feeding drm locked games like mmo's... mmo's were the trial bal;oon for the corporate worlds big push to take control of software.

They no longer have any incentive to create sp+multiplayer inside the same game run locally from your machine.

We've seen this with league of legends, dota 2, etc. Those games in a prior era would have been full stand alone rts games /w multiplayer, the reason they are "f2p" is because game devs could reach the entire planet of the bottom half of the low iq bell curve and get kids and stupid people to pay money for skins in games you don't own.

The whole model is based on fraud, why would anyone from the quake 3 era PAY for skins in a quake game they didn't own? Mods, ctf, all the cool shit we enjoyed would have been impossible.

That's why 20 years later we basically live in a software dystopia, where windows 10 has freaking drm in it, because the average computer user is just irrationally stupid to an insane degree.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
Man you guys can't read between the lines... in the 90's, games were complete with both single player code and multiplayer code included inside the game, you got client and server inside the same exe.

And in the 90s, save the early MMOs, you could not get thousands of people piled onto the same game server. Period. End of discussion.

Some of us wanted that. No private server gets you Barrens chat or any of those things. It's like you don't even understand what an MMO is, at all.
 
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zink77

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Jan 16, 2012
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And in the 90s, save the early MMOs, you could not get thousands of people piled onto the same game server. Period. End of discussion.

Some of us wanted that. No private server gets you Barrens chat or any of those things. It's like you don't even understand what an MMO is, at all.

Uhh... you missed the point that that was all possible without the drm and subscription, once again proving that the gaming public is stupid beyond comprehension. Note that link to private wow servers, meaning you could have had 1000's of players running their own massively multiplayer shards.

All it is is an RPG with player count increased, it's not a different genre then rpg. It's all just a bunch of word salad to undermine game ownership which the corporate world has done in spades the last 20 years.

We saw diablo go from something we owned and controlled to diablo 3 the "MMO". The only difference between D2 and D3 is how the software is coded. That's all that's different between them. There is nothing special about a piece of software. There is no excuse for them basically stealing videogames and calling them mmo's/services/etc. It was all a ruse to defraud the population which is why we now have friggin lootboxes.

That was the whole point of corporations inventing words like "MMO", "F2P", "Microtransaction". I swear the modern gamer is like a yes man for corporations when you're literally having your games stolen, destroyed and taken offline forever all because they convinced you by PR manipulation and clever marketing.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
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Uhh... you missed the point that that was all possible without the drm and subscription,

NO IT WASN'T. Somebody had to pay the bills for all that software development, bandwidth, and server hardware. Nobody was going to pony up the cash for software that could work on commodity x86 scale-out systems to handle that population unless there was the expectation of profit.

Even wildly successful titles like Diablo, Quake, etc. couldn't convince the publishers to back an MMO when the only revenue stream was going to be the box-o-software for $60 (plus maybe expansions). If anyone had taken ESO's current subscription model to an investor's meeting, they would have been laughed out of the room. Bethsoft didn't want to go that way either, but let's face it, real MMOs are mostly dead except for a few titles like WoW; FFXIV; and ESO. And nobody wanted to do what was effectively R&D on producing server software just to distribute it with the client and let people try to cobble together their own hobbyist servers to run like an old-school MUD. Do you have any idea how much work companies had to do to develop back-ends to handle games like WoW? I had a front-row seat watching the UO pre-alpha devs struggle with their server design (which was pretty awful, actually). At the time it was expensive and very difficult.

When MMOs first went mainstream in the mid-to-late 90s (not counting older titles like Gemstone and the original NWN), the subscription was very much necessary to fund development of titles. No $15 per month = no MMOs, at all. Today they prefer microtransactions. C'est la vie.
 
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bystander36

Diamond Member
Apr 1, 2013
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'
Except that's where you're wrong... I was there when PC RPG's in development were rebranded mmo's, notice RPG's on the PC slowed to a trickle and guild wars was just rebranded mmo. DRM is any program that is run from a computer that isn't yours.

Let's not forget wow's private servers as scientific evidence against your position:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444122

Now why would blizzard try to shut down private servers? Oh yeah because we used to get dedicated servers and multiplayer inside RPG games until the big push to steal PC RPG's on the PC by rebranding them mmo's and selling them to suckers.

MMO's are just PC RPG's with a marketing moniker. MMO's are not some special class of game, they were the test case to test how stupid the gaming public was and you're proof of this fact.

The reason we have diablo 3 with always online drm is specifically because of pioneering efforts of Ultima online, everquest and wow.

A game is just a computer program, there's no reason for the game to not run 100% on your computer.

Just look at what happened to Team fortress 2, Tribes Ascend, Path of Exile, etc... all those "f2p" games are just another word for DRM locked game you don't own that they are asking for money for.

That's why modding has gone the way of the dodo to a large extent in the AAA space and we no longer get level editors. Just look at what happened to doom 2016... The multiplayer has no dedicated server exe's and they are running the matchmaking from corporate machine or an AWS colo. Either way parts of the games have been taken out of the game to remove more and more control out of your hands.
Let's get a few things straight. Guild wars is not an MMO. It was an upgrade to the Diablo style of game. The cities were just game rooms where people try to setup games and enter a zone to play. They only allowed a few people in them, and spawned new rooms as they became over loaded. I'm not even sure the actual gaming zones were played on their servers. Those cities were like Diablo's online rooms where you could setup a game and enter the actual game, which in Diablo's case, was still run on your own PC (not sure about Guild wars).

MMO's like Everquest and WoW are vastly different experiences. These are large worlds, with 100's of people in the same zones. Their game play was quite different as well. This brought a large social aspect to RPG's that previously lacked. People who wanted to have a large living world with a lot of social interactions, played MMORPG's. Unfortunately, MMORPG's are downgrading those social aspects, so I stopped playing them, because as RPG's go, they suck. It's the social involvement that made them different.

Diablo 3 took what Guildwars did, and made it purely online, on their servers. They aren't MMO's, but they are online only, with built in DRM as a result.
 

zink77

Member
Jan 16, 2012
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Let's get a few things straight. Guild wars is not an MMO. It was an upgrade to the Diablo style of game. The cities were just game rooms where people try to setup games and enter a zone to play. They only allowed a few people in them, and spawned new rooms as they became over loaded. I'm not even sure the actual gaming zones were played on their servers. Those cities were like Diablo's online rooms where you could setup a game and enter the actual game, which in Diablo's case, was still run on your own PC (not sure about Guild wars).

MMO's like Everquest and WoW are vastly different experiences. These are large worlds, with 100's of people in the same zones. Their game play was quite different as well. This brought a large social aspect to RPG's that previously lacked. People who wanted to have a large living world with a lot of social interactions, played MMORPG's. Unfortunately, MMORPG's are downgrading those social aspects, so I stopped playing them, because as RPG's go, they suck. It's the social involvement that made them different.

Diablo 3 took what Guildwars did, and made it purely online, on their servers. They aren't MMO's, but they are online only, with built in DRM as a result.


And all you said was a bunch of gobbleydy beloved patriot....

There is no difference betwene guild wars, diablo3 and an "MMO" they are both just videogame software that is server locked. AKA you can run wow, guild wars, diablo 3 and UO without corporate controlled servers as a stand alone game as private servers have already proved.

Everyone who has an "MMO" hard on has been tricked propaganda, they have psychologists to fool people like you.

See the science, I can tell you the facts and you won't reason to the right conclusion:


So please stop embarassing yourselves, the fact that private servers exist for "MMO RPG's" is proof they are always just RPG's rebranded to take advantage of gullible people like the mmo defenders in this forum.

A piece of software is just a piece of software, you've been tricked by language games corporations have played knowing that you reason by emotion, not truth.

The level of tech illiteracy regarding programming and software in this forum is frigging embarrassing for a place like anandtech.
 

bystander36

Diamond Member
Apr 1, 2013
5,154
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And all you said was a bunch of gobbleydy beloved patriot....

There is no difference betwene guild wars, diablo3 and an "MMO" they are both just videogame software that is server locked. AKA you can run wow, guild wars, diablo 3 and UO without corporate controlled servers as a stand alone game as private servers have already proved.
You just don't understand what an MMO is, and what a coop game is. I played through the transition, and there is a pretty big difference. Obviously you don't want to understand the difference, but there is a large one. One that anyone who has played both would understand. Even PoE is borderline to call an MMO.
 

bystander36

Diamond Member
Apr 1, 2013
5,154
132
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Let me help you here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_game
A massively multiplayer online game (MMOG, or more commonly, MMO) is an online game with large numbers of players, typically from hundreds to thousands, on the same server.[1][not in citation given] MMOs usually feature a huge, persistent open world, although some games differ. These games can be found for most network-capable platforms, including the personal computer, video game console, or smartphones and other mobile devices.
MMOs can enable players to cooperate and compete with each other on a large scale, and sometimes to interact meaningfully with people around the world. They include a variety of gameplay types, representing many video game genres.

A couple key points are the 100's to 1000's on the same server (guild wars might have 5 players per server, same with PoE). Large persistent worlds is another key that those games lack. You go into instances with a few people, then leave and they are gone. The large scale part is really key for an MMO.
 

zink77

Member
Jan 16, 2012
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Let me help you here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_game


A couple key points are the 100's to 1000's on the same server (guild wars might have 5 players per server, same with PoE). Large persistent worlds is another key that those games lack. You go into instances with a few people, then leave and they are gone. The large scale part is really key for an MMO.

You once again missed the point... THERE IS NO REASON FOR CORPORATIONS TO CONTROL THE SOFTWARE.
This has already been proven by private servers, so no, mmo is a marketing scam. You've been confused by language, you haven't provided one shred of evidence that you can't run mmo's locally because I've already proven it with the fact there exists private servers.

So please stop responding you are technology illiterate, you gullibly believe the corporate propaganda that is put out. There is NO difference between an MMO and an RPG, MMO is just an invented label by a marketing department somewhere to confuse gullible people like you.

This forum has a serious case of dunning krueger...

he Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.[1]

As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

Just.......No.

It appears you have finally stopped with the profanity,
however you have moved on to personal insults. Those
also are not allowed in the tech areas.


I have put a strike through everything that is not necessary
(or allowed). In fact, read through the forum posting
guidelines during your time off.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/anandtech-forum-guidelines.60552/

AT Mod Usandthem
 
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DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
You just don't understand what an MMO is, and what a coop game is. I played through the transition, and there is a pretty big difference. Obviously you don't want to understand the difference, but there is a large one. One that anyone who has played both would understand. Even PoE is borderline to call an MMO.

Might be wasting your breath. The guy thinks the back-end of Everquest was as cheap to develop and deploy as the hobbyist Project 1999. There's no difference between Diablo 3 and FFXIV too, according to him.

You once again missed the point... THERE IS NO REASON FOR CORPORATIONS TO CONTROL THE SOFTWARE.

Of course there is. Nobody else can afford to produce the stuff. It cost Bethsoft over $100 million to develop ESO. And that was an upfront cost, before they had sold their first box-o-software or gotten their first subscription payment (and they don't even get those anymore, except from the diehards). They're still eating crow over that one.

So after spending alllll that time and money producing the client and backend for ESO, did you honestly think they were just going to release the backend and say, "have at it!"? And try to patch the software with an unknown number of deployments on unknown hardware configurations in the wild? Honestly. Keeping the servers running in top shape without buggy behavior on their own servers is hard enough. Now you're going to get customers complaining to you of server outages on servers you don't even run (ugh) or bugs when some idiot tries running the backend on a Beowulf cluster of overclocked 9900ks or some such nonsense.

This has already been proven by private servers

You're so funny.

So please stop responding you are technology illiterate

You certainly do like insulting people who don't grovel at your feet.
 
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SMOGZINN

Lifer
Jun 17, 2005
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Nobody else can afford to produce the stuff.

Not only that but no one else could have afforded to host them. Blizzard barely was able to keep WoW up and running in it's prime, and it had practically unlimited money to throw at it. There were hundreds of thousands (maybe millions?) of simultaneous users. I used to run a MUD that had several hundred simultaneous users on a purely text based system and we could barely afford to keep it running, I can't imagine what it took to keep a WoW server running, in both technical expertise and cost.

There is simply no other way that something of that scale could have existed at all, and the scale is what puts the massive in the multiplayer game.
 

Ranulf

Platinum Member
Jul 18, 2001
2,331
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The guy has an argument with Diablo3 in the sense that there was no need to require always online except they wanted access control to secure the gold/real money auction houses. That Blizz released D3 on consoles proved the game didn't need always online to just play it.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
The guy has an argument with Diablo3 in the sense that there was no need to require always online except they wanted access control to secure the gold/real money auction houses. That Blizz released D3 on consoles proved the game didn't need always online to just play it.

That's D3 though. Hell D2 proved that. D3 ain't no MMO though.
 

bystander36

Diamond Member
Apr 1, 2013
5,154
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The guy has an argument with Diablo3 in the sense that there was no need to require always online except they wanted access control to secure the gold/real money auction houses. That Blizz released D3 on consoles proved the game didn't need always online to just play it.
That's D3 though. Hell D2 proved that. D3 ain't no MMO though.

Ya, D3 was online to prevent cheating and as a DRM, but ya, it's no MMO.
 

bystander36

Diamond Member
Apr 1, 2013
5,154
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You once again missed the point... THERE IS NO REASON FOR CORPORATIONS TO CONTROL THE SOFTWARE.
This has already been proven by private servers, so no, mmo is a marketing scam. You've been confused by language, you haven't provided one shred of evidence that you can't run mmo's locally because I've already proven it with the fact there exists private servers.

So please stop responding you are technology illiterate, you gullibly believe the corporate propaganda that is put out. There is NO difference between an MMO and an RPG, MMO is just an invented label by a marketing department somewhere to confuse gullible people like you.
Whether it's a scam or not, doesn't change what an MMO is. And the terms MMO and RPG are not related. MMO's don't have to be RPG's and RPG's don't have to be MMO's. Their meaning is unrelated. It's quite hard to have a conversation if you won't stick to the proper definitions.

That said, online games have 3 purposes: they allow for online play with many people at a time (you can't just host a game with 100's of usesr on a personal computer), they have built in DRM's, and in the case of MMO's and anything where there is competition, it vastly reduces cheating of any sort. The games were created due to a demand to play with people online, not as a DRM method. But their success caused a lot of people in the industry to take notice.
 

BFG10K

Lifer
Aug 14, 2000
22,672
2,817
126
The guy has an argument with Diablo3 in the sense that there was no need to require always online except they wanted access control to secure the gold/real money auction houses. That Blizz released D3 on consoles proved the game didn't need always online to just play it.
Agreed. You could make the case for MMOs needing cloud due to hosting thousands of players at once per server, but not Diablo 3. Diablo 3's constant internet connection for single player was pure DRM.

The most egregious example is Starcraft disabling HD assets when its constant internet connection is cut.

That's why I was mildly shocked when Blizzard partnered with GOG for DRM-free Diablo and Warcraft 2.
 
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KMFJD

Lifer
Aug 11, 2005
29,043
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I've been following the attempts to revive City of Heroes and currently they are facing the following:

: The server is currently costing around $2100 per month, but there’s a reasonable chance we may have to scale up further for stability. In order to sustain the load from last night without major issues, the cost would likely go up to around $2700 a month.
:
  • Peak player count was just over 3,300
  • 16,839 accounts have been created
  • 26,262 characters have been made
  • 255,685,139 XP has been earned
  • 293,306,562 influence held by characters
  • The highest level player is Dacaleos, a level 39 Brute
  • Origins:
  • 7,475 Magic
  • 5,647 Mutation
  • 4,712 Natural
  • 4,204 Science
  • 4,136 Technology
  • Archetypes:
  • 3,482 Blasters
  • 3,435 Brutes
  • 3,350 Masterminds
  • 3,123 Scrappers
  • 2,263 Controllers
  • 2,129 Tankers
  • 1,823 Defenders
  • 1,625 Corruptors
  • 1,334 Sentinels
  • 1,212 Dominators
  • 935 Stalkers
  • 436 Peacebringers
  • 401 Warshades
  • 394 Arachnos Soldiers
  • 246 Arachnos Widows

That said : there's a post out there saying private servers and lan servers are doable

kinda relevant i guess
 
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