JUST GOT MY DIABLO 3 DIGITAL COPY REFUND!

I can't quite recall what I said to which you are agreeing, but the majority of your post is pro-D3, which I obviously am not.

I am, however, pro-not-getting-a-refund-if-the-consumer-gained-sufficient-use-out-of-the-product.

And I think that reaching Inferno should constitute such a sufficiency, even if the game 'starts' at inferno -- that's an arbitrary declaration. For quite a few of my friends, the game ended at Normal. They saw the story, they moved on. I suppose they knew that to go further was to court disappointment. Clever them.

Either way, it's certainly not my call who gets a refund and how -- any more than it was my call whether or not that stupid bint who burnt herself with McD's coffee because the lid didn't say 'HOT COFFEE' deserved such a massive payout.

Specifically, the part where you mentioned that by doing some homework on the game, pre-purchase, you could get a good idea of what you're getting into. Even in 2008, I knew what I was going to be marching into eventually when the game came out and the best I could do is keep an open-mind towards it which has not always been the case.

Obviously the gross exaggeration of "trillions of builds" is something that could be seen easily by simply asserting what that means to the salesman and to the buyer. The buyer expects each of those builds to bring a completely different dynamic from another, the salesman is giving you a pretty shortcut in how a "different build" is defined. Right now, I do not even know if every class has even six drastically different builds.

I also think it is completely unfair to the company that you could easily hit the max level and experience almost all of the content then have the audacity to ask for a refund. Perhaps I come from a different ideology, but it displays poor character, especially given the "warning signs" you had pre-release. It is also why I most of the time roll my eyes at those that act as if it were an affront on their house when they are not satisfied.

Now if there was some gamebreaking glitch or exploit or the game simply did not work for you and there was no plans to get a new computer (because if you're like me, you're woefully lost in computer specs or what they mean) then that would be more valid. Right now it seems you bought the game, spent your time with it, then decided to take your money back because you disliked something you could have seen a week prior to the game being loaded into the stock room of every major retailer.

This will likely earn a negative reaction.

"

Disillusioned wrote:

Specifically, the part where you mentioned that by doing some homework on the game, pre-purchase, you could get a good idea of what you're getting into. Even in 2008, I knew what I was going to be marching into eventually when the game came out and the best I could do is keep an open-mind towards it which has not always been the case.

Obviously the gross exaggeration of "trillions of builds" is something that could be seen easily by simply asserting what that means to the salesman and to the buyer. The buyer expects each of those builds to bring a completely different dynamic from another, the salesman is giving you a pretty shortcut in how a "different build" is defined. Right now, I do not even know if every class has even six drastically different builds.

I also think it is completely unfair to the company that you could easily hit the max level and experience almost all of the content then have the audacity to ask for a refund. Perhaps I come from a different ideology, but it displays poor character, especially given the "warning signs" you had pre-release. It is also why I most of the time roll my eyes at those that act as if it were an affront on their house when they are not satisfied.

I guess Pinto owners who had a gas tank explode on them wouldn't be entitled to a refund either.

"

Disillusioned wrote:

Now if there was some gamebreaking glitch or exploit or the game simply did not work for you and there was no plans to get a new computer (because if you're like me, you're woefully lost in computer specs or what they mean) then that would be more valid. Right now it seems you bought the game, spent your time with it, then decided to take your money back because you disliked something you could have seen a week prior to the game being loaded into the stock room of every major retailer.

You know, like having your account hacked and getting all of your items stolen.

i find that profanity offensive

"

Flauros wrote:

"

Disillusioned wrote:

Specifically, the part where you mentioned that by doing some homework on the game, pre-purchase, you could get a good idea of what you're getting into. Even in 2008, I knew what I was going to be marching into eventually when the game came out and the best I could do is keep an open-mind towards it which has not always been the case.

Obviously the gross exaggeration of "trillions of builds" is something that could be seen easily by simply asserting what that means to the salesman and to the buyer. The buyer expects each of those builds to bring a completely different dynamic from another, the salesman is giving you a pretty shortcut in how a "different build" is defined. Right now, I do not even know if every class has even six drastically different builds.

I also think it is completely unfair to the company that you could easily hit the max level and experience almost all of the content then have the audacity to ask for a refund. Perhaps I come from a different ideology, but it displays poor character, especially given the "warning signs" you had pre-release. It is also why I most of the time roll my eyes at those that act as if it were an affront on their house when they are not satisfied.

I guess Pinto owners who had a gas tank explode on them wouldn't be entitled to a refund either.

"

Disillusioned wrote:

Now if there was some gamebreaking glitch or exploit or the game simply did not work for you and there was no plans to get a new computer (because if you're like me, you're woefully lost in computer specs or what they mean) then that would be more valid. Right now it seems you bought the game, spent your time with it, then decided to take your money back because you disliked something you could have seen a week prior to the game being loaded into the stock room of every major retailer.

You know, like having your account hacked and getting all of your items stolen.

First point:

I'm no car junkie, but did these car owners have full knowledge of what could possibly happen in a rear-end collision with this gas tank problem in effect? If they had prior knowledge, I would say it is a bit silly to buy something with such a defect. But that is neither here nor there because now we're accusing D3 as being a defected product which it isn't. It is a controversial product since it is really quite a, "love or hate" game. Just because I have a different definition of, let's say, "fun" does not mean it rings the true for others. I find D3 fun, you may not. I do not find Dark Souls fun, you may.

It generally takes people a few hours of a game to know if they're not satisfied or are satisfied. There was even an open beta weekend stress test. Typically, it would not take somebody four playthroughs of the game which would take some great time investment to know if they're satisfied or not. To me, that means to an extent you were satisfied.

As for your second point:

The Authenticator really does work wonders if you have it set to, "Always ask when logging in." To blame a user-end problem on a company is complete rubbish. Whether it is GGG or Blizzard.

Well, I think that "the game is not defective" may not be true for all customers (I really only remembered it because of that 'exploding car' analogy).

There currently is an issue with D3 and Nvidia GPUs, which may cause the GPU to overheat and shut the entire system down. There's apparently some connection between that and the maximum fps you can set in the options (and which by default is set to 150).
Lowering it will decrease the load on your CPU, so there is a workaround.

But they don't mention this anywhere but in their Technical forums (when users began to complain). It's a flaw that (though unlikely, since fail-safes are quite good nowadays) might damage hardware. And it's certainly not funny when your system just shuts down and you have unsaved work there.

This isn't meant as a "D3 sux" speech. But if your company is aware of such problems, and is even investigating them together with the hardware manufacturer, the normal thing to do would be to inform your customers and how to work around it. And not have this information "hidden" somewhere in the depths of their forums, relying on customers to inform themselves. They typically only do that if the problem already occurred. Which might have avoided altogether, had Blizzard been better with communicating this "bug".

"

Disillusioned wrote:

First point:
I'm no car junkie, but did these car owners have full knowledge of what could possibly happen in a rear-end collision with this gas tank problem in effect? If they had prior knowledge, I would say it is a bit silly to buy something with such a defect.

It would be silly- except that Ford spent a significant amount of money trying to cover it up, the same way Blizzard keeps denying the existence of any security holes on battle.net.

"

Disillusioned wrote:

But that is neither here nor there because now we're accusing D3 as being a defected product which it isn't. It is a controversial product since it is really quite a, "love or hate" game.

Every game is defective to some degree; nothing is perfect. It's just that some games are more imperfect than others.

"

Disillusioned wrote:

Just because I have a different definition of, let's say, "fun" does not mean it rings the true for others. I find D3 fun, you may not. I do not find Dark Souls fun, you may.

Agree with the general point here.

"

Disillusioned wrote:

It generally takes people a few hours of a game to know if they're not satisfied or are satisfied. There was even an open beta weekend stress test. Typically, it would not take somebody four playthroughs of the game which would take some great time investment to know if they're satisfied or not. To me, that means to an extent you were satisfied.

The point is whether or not he was satisfied. The product he bought isn't the product he expected. "Satisfaction" is far too abstract to govern something like commercial law concerning refunds.

"

Disillusioned wrote:

As for your second point:
The Authenticator really does work wonders if you have it set to, "Always ask when logging in." To blame a user-end problem on a company is complete rubbish. Whether it is GGG or Blizzard.

I have no doubt that in some cases the user is at fault. But for Blizzard to completely deny the existence of any security holes in their server seems suspicious, since there is no such thing as perfect security. Security holes exist, whether or not you know of them.

As for the authenticator, it can only stop attacks at a very specific point. Keyloggers, packet sniffers, man in the middle attacks, and dishonest employees can easily bypass an authenticator, to say nothing of simply hacking Blizzard's servers.

"

Flauros wrote:

The point is whether or not he was satisfied. The product he bought isn't the product he expected. "Satisfaction" is far too abstract to govern something like commercial law concerning refunds.

I cannot stress enough how much I agree with this, but I'm no lawyer and can only shake my head at half the things people sue for, and most of the things they win over.

"

Every game is defective to some degree; nothing is perfect. It's just that some games are more imperfect than others.

But using your car analogy, D3 is not defective to the degree of lethality or as you're relating, to the degree of safety in regards to account security.

"

The product he bought isn't the product he expected.

I can reasonably see somebody purchasing the game, playing through Normal and maybe Nightmare and then deciding it is not what they were expecting. It is when you "beat" the game four times over, on all four difficulty settings, that it looks a little silly. If the expectation was that Inferno is not what was your idea of a hard difficulty setting then it should be noted that there was an update that discussed there were plans to change how the game was being played.

But the main point is, to say that a game that has been from one of the most popular video-game series and has not seen a sequel for over a decade and was not "the product that was expected" is in itself, something to be expected. D3 was not going to nail everything everybody wanted to see. There was even a post on the official forums that basically said that D3 is nowhere near a bad game but it won't be the game that will satisfy every individual fan on every level:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4063008863?page=2#36

"

But for Blizzard to completely deny the existence of any security holes in their server seems suspicious, since there is no such thing as perfect security. Security holes exist, whether or not you know of them.

I don't think it is from their servers. What we are being given is a list of anecdotal situations for people to base judgement off of. Now if I told you that I had a hundred hours on my main character, an authenticator, have played various public games, and have been using this laptop for the past four years and have not been hacked on the game does that convince anybody any? Likely not, because most people will see the number of people that have been hacked and disregard my defense.

But what is being forgotten is that D3 has sold *a lot* of copies. Somewhere in the range of five million or more so far? Now let's say there has been about one thousand cases so far of compromised accounts, that is a nearly insignificant amount when compared to the majority.

Now I would not completely rule out that possibility, but the fact is there has been no proof of it happening. If half the number of people that bought the game were getting hacked then this would be evident that there was something very wrong.

To my knowledge, many people have yet to hit max level/Inferno difficulty so it is possible that many people have not played public games (yet there have been reports of being hacked despite only playing alone, but I digress). When the rest of them catch up and teaming up to take on Inferno becomes much more attractive, we'll see then. However, as somebody that hit max level in three days and has been playing public games since, I can tell you from my experience nothing has happened.

And then there are the variables to consider. Is it the right authenticator? Did you even activate it to ask everytime you log in? Do you use the same password that may have been compromised on something else before?

My view on the hacking thing is that it is a few people that simply do not want to take responsibility for their actions.

I'm starting to worry that I'm not going to get my refund on D3. I get the feeling Bliz is stalling me. I can't get through on the support line, all lines are busy. No response to my ticket through the online support, been almost a week now.