This seems a bit childish to me, to be honest. Other people work outside the range of civilization and internet too, and they deal with the fact that certain services and products will not be available to them. It was lame of Blizzard to take out LAN, but playing the "for our troops!" card is awfully petty considering it's just a video game. Diablo III is not Diablo II, Blizzard really doesn't owe us any promises. And if they've made a terrible decision, they won't be selling many copies of D3.

We'll see how that goes...

I'm positive there are going to be people that hack it to make it work without the internet... no need to point fingers at blizzactivision. They are probably just trying to avoid pirates.

I'm one of the people who won't be able to play it for a while because I work in a remote area. I'd probably be angry if I was a bigger Diablo fan, but I'm not, and I emptied my bile ducts in the RPG Thread a week or two ago anyway and I need time to restore my stockpiles of righteous indignation.

"Just trying to avoid pirates" is naive as a mother, though.

I just don't like the fact I need to go online to play Singleplayer and possibly be affected by lag.... in solo play. Yep. GG with that.

I have a simple solution : Offline mode. No access to cash money auction house, other restrictions but you can play offline and don't have to be online. Problem solved.

Now, despite what I said above, Diablo 3 looks a lot harder to pirate than most games out there, including Starcraft 2. We're probably not going to see any day-one torrented copies or whatever. And Blizzard is very happy about that, I'm sure, very proud about it, but that's just part of the "why", here.

Seeing as how WOW and other MMO's have private servers I say give it a month tops and the Interwebz will have listing for Diablo III private servers as well.

Yeah, the fact that you can lag in single player is just... wtf. Piracy exists. It's going to happen. As has been said above, it may take a little longer than usual, but someone will figure out how to pirate D3/setup private servers or some new way around it that Blizzard hasn't even thought of yet. I am not advocating piracy at all, but last I checked, they still made plenty of money on D2. Hell, I would bet that the money they spent developing their anti-piracy tech > money lost due to piracy.

Companies need to grow up and realize the world is a changing place. Instead of fighting piracy with draconian DRM methods, do it by including exclusive content like art books, music CDs, dvds or other innovative stuff. Take a look at the Humble Bundle's innovation. It's not the same thing, nor is it directly applicable to D3, but I think it does prove that non-traditional models can and will be successful.

This is all semi-off-topic though. There is no reason someone shouldn't be able to play it 100% offline with no option to bring that character online. Their decision to do it that way is preventing nerds who serve their country from getting much needed downtime. I think that sucks and I want to let blizzard know how I feel. I don't expect it to change a damn thing, though I wish it would. If you think it sucks too, take 30 seconds and sign the petition.

I get that some people are really irritated by the choices that BlizzardVision has made concerning D3, but honestly, if you dont like what they have done, dont buy the damn game and move on. Wait another month or 2 and get Torchlight 2 for 40 bucks cheaper and be happy with that,

The real problem here is PC gaming.

I'll save the tl'dr, but that's what it comes down to.

I'd love to see the tl;dr version, as I'm very skeptical of your assertion.