Quote Originally Posted by I'm my own MILF View Post
I've only got one Internet cable running to my room and none of my trout is wireless, so getting a console online is actually a big hassle for me and involves moving stuff around so I can switch the cables.
If only there were things like Hubs, Switches or PowerLine adapters to provide more convenience.

And yes, people are still going on about D3, because huge numbers of people being unable to play the game they paid for at release is a pretty big piece of evidence that there are problems with always-online requirements. You can't just dismiss it by saying "It's all in the past now".
Or it's more accurately a pretty big piece of evidence that sales forecasting needs to be better so more hardware is in place. It's also hardly dismissing it by pointing out that a) they worked through the issues pretty quickly, b) have improved the game substantially since then at no additional monetary cost and well... c) despite the uproar at launch it's still played by a subsantial amount of people worldwide to this day. Which on that note d) not everyone is going to get something on launch day/week which is when the most amount of issues tend to pop-up. Are there problems with it, sure - but for the most part they are short-term temporary problems.

Just look at something like Wings of Liberty and more recently Heart of the Swarm - where yes, you can play single player offline if you really want too but you still need to authenticate via Battle.net first with the caveat being you can't get achievements playing offline. Those launches went off without a hitch and people are far less up in arms about having to be connected to Battle.net to play especially now resume from replay has been added that makes disconnections non-game killing.

The great thing in the case of Diablo 3 is despite all the uproar both before launch and after launch about being always online it still went on to sell over 10 million copies. Which is the thing really, a minority of consumers are very vocal but then they still purchase the thing they've railed against - and those that don't, usually invest very little into the industry as a whole anyway. If the 720 enjoys any degree of success you can guarantee that Sony will be jumping onto the gravy train come the PS5 either willing, or by buckling under publisher pressure.

But then again I also remember the days when people were up in arms over playing console games over the internet because it destroyed the social aspect of playing games together.

Still despite living in rural Ireland with an internet connection that drops every couple of hours or pretty much all the time if it's raining - it still doesn't bother me. I'm not the type of person that picks-up console hardware at launch and my purchasing decision will, as always, be decided based on the respective games libraries. Besides the 720 hasn't even been officially unveiled yet so I will hold judgment until all the cards are actually on the table.

To me this is just the beginning, like it or loathe it the Always-On future is coming - and it's not just limited to gaming - give it 20 to 30 years and the imgur of tomorrow will be full of pictures joking about how the kids of tomorrow don't know what an ethernet cable or TV remote control are.