Sunday had the Diablo EU servers down for about four hours. I could forgive the two hours it took for them to get started at launch but since then the service hasn't been up to scratch. Every lag spike and error 37 is a mark against the idea of making the game without an offline mode. The argument against one mode is a bit weak. Offline characters could never be taken online and it does help slow the development of cheats but cheats will happen, some showed up in the beta. Player hosted games would result in piracy but isn't that a non issue for a developer such as blizzard? Battle.net provides a lot and puts them in a similar position to Steam, who don't worry about piracy as they win over a ton of customers with convenience and service.

I can't see them backing down. As a popular developer they can afford to ignore petitions or boycotts and as long as the servers operate smoothly most players will remain content.

Sunday had the Diablo EU servers down for about four hours. I could forgive the two hours it took for them to get started at launch but since then the service hasn't been up to scratch. Every lag spike and error 37 is a mark against the idea of making the game without an offline mode. The argument against one mode is a bit weak. Offline characters could never be taken online and it does help slow the development of cheats but cheats will happen, some showed up in the beta. Player hosted games would result in piracy but isn't that a non issue for a developer such as blizzard? Battle.net provides a lot and puts them in a similar position to Steam, who don't worry about piracy as they win over a ton of customers with convenience and service.

I can't see them backing down. As a popular developer they can afford to ignore petitions or boycotts and as long as the servers operate smoothly most players will remain content.

You are making the assumption the problems Blizzard is seeing in Battle.Net wouldn't have been as crippling as a single player mode, I see the argument otherwise to also be weak:

- I played Diablo 2 so much online I forgot about and never consider it a problem for Diablo 3 since I'll play so much of it online. The only time I even bothered with single player in Diablo 2 was to build characters or to try some mod. It was amusing but not productive or a long term thing since I'd end up back in Battle.net doing Baal runs with as many people as possible to up the chances for rare and legendary items.

- The trend in online games is to make the client as thin as possible. The Diablo 3 is just like other FPS games where it is only there to take player input and render the scene. Adding a single player mode would increase the complexity by a lot. Balance tweaks and bugs would require updates to both systems. I don't think Blizzard would even entertain the idea of a console version (which is not assured) if it had to support a stand alone/offline engine.

- I am tired of losing characters and hacks in online games. I lost way to many characters in Diablo 2 where just standing in a game with someone using a hack broke my character. I only want to see valid characters with valid gear in valid and fair instances. And if there is a problem I want them to be able to be able to rollback characters to a sane state instead of losing the whole thing.

- I am happy to not to be forced manage character data and files. My family has multiple computers where if someone needs one machine, I can happily use the other and all of my stuff is there. In fact this is something I wish more games would do as a service for the player. Playing long running games like Mass Effect should be handled like this where expecting me to have a surviving save file to import across multiple systems is difficult if not impossible.

It really is only a matter of time until someone makes a server emulator, so if you want to enjoy the game you bought lag-free sans the online features then I would suggest wait until that comes out.

Personally, I find blizzard's handling off the situation nigh-unforgivable. With all of the virtualization and automation software that is surely available to blizzard,

@EXTomar: Was only suggesting that there was an offline mode in addition to the normal online only.