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Were people able to play during this outage? My understanding is that you must log in to notch's servers to play and I find that really asinine. I am not exactly clear on the point, however, because he claims that there is "no DRM", but obviously requiring approval from his server is a pretty draconian form of DRM in effect, whether he is actively deploying DRM-like functionality at the time or not.
you can play single-player and on non-authenticated multi-player servers without the central authentication server being up.
What's the difference between an authenticated and non-authenticated multiplayer server?
One requires authentication from Notches sever.
Uh, right, but why would you run an authenticated v. non-authenticated server? Just to prevent pirates from connecting to your server because you support notch? Is it like Battlefield or those other games with ranked v. non-ranked where ranked offers persistent stats? I am curious if there is any benefit in running an authenticated server other than moral support for appearing on notch's list of approved players.
From what I understand the non-paid users have a much higher probability to be "griefers" or those that destroy buildings/piss off other users.
Because it offers a centralised way of nuking players off your server. And if they want to play again, a new copy of the game is 15 dollars more expensive than refreshing your IP address.
You can play single-player as long as you've logged in at least once ever. I think it's a very reasonable security scheme, and it allowed me to play for a month or two while I didn't have internet access at home.
If the server is down, you can play offline, but disables updates and custom avatar skins.
This is the sort of design I like in a game; losing access to the central servers only stops features that need a central server (patches, authentication against a central account for multiplayer) and everything else keeps on working just fine.
The comments thread on that announcement is really quite funny: "Hit them with some Chicken Freestyle".
So it was not an attack, but now it is one? ( see: http://twitter.com/notch/status/27984231275 That was posted 30 minutes ago)
No, they're both attacks. The original we thought was an attack, then we thought it wasn't, then we found out it was.
Thanks for clarifying...I wasn't sure if it was 2 attacks, which makes more sense, or just a random downtime and THEN a real attack...
I'm wondering if the publicity of personal fortunes being made inspired a ransomed attack?