Ok, so there's definitely downsides to this. I think some people are blowing things out of proportions, but that's just a matter of scale, so I won't nitpick that much.

Quote Originally Posted by Starwulf View Post
It's not going to prevent 15million pirates. The game will be pirated a week after release, and hacked a month after. Again, all they are doing is punishing their loyal customers. End of story.
Maybe it will be pirated a week after release...but those people won't be able to play on the Blizz servers. If it were really that easy to hack an online-only game, then WoW would be filled with hackers and pirated accounts, and there'd be no reason to steal other people's accounts.

Also, I think you guys are downplaying the difficulty of making the game work in singleplayer. It's not like they can just flip a switch and make this happen. The game seems to be built around being online, so changing it so that all that data that's stored and processed by the server to instead be stored on your computer, is a big deal. It would probably take weeks to months just to develop, and then even longer to work out all the bugs.

Maybe there will be single-player eventually, in a patch or expansion or something, but I honestly doubt it. Saying that 10% of the potential buyers of the game won't buy it because of this honestly seems a bit absurd. I would guess that maybe 1% of the potential buyers will be flat-out unable to play because of it. As for people not buying the game on principle, I'm sure you could find a million people that will say that, but 49% of them are going to buy the game anyways and 49% weren't going to buy it in the first place.


Also on the topic of hacking, I wouldn't be surprised if people eventually hacked the game and got it to run offline through some sort of fake-server shenanigans, so if you're really desperate maybe you'll have that as an option for offline play eventually.