An entire season behind. And you can rest assured the cost in other markets is a lot more than $2.99. US iTunes store prices are way less than anywhere else.

Yay - someone gets it :D There's a reason Australia pirates so much and it's not because we're evil, dirty people who refuse to pay for stuff. It's just that American (well, mostly American) companies refuse to offer their 'legal' options outside the US. Don't they want our money?

Mind you, our companies do the same thing. Australian TV channels all have free online streaming and catch-up services (some of which are damn good, ABC iView is brilliant), but they too are blocked outside Australia. Incredibly annoying when you're travelling (until I left a SOCKS proxy running at home ... that works nicely). Stupid copyright law!

I suppose it depends what you define as DRM. I always thought "DRM" strictly referred to the locking of actual data (i.e. music, movies, software) to a particular user in order to prevent copying/sharing of that data. "Always online" requirements, while just as annoying, I didn't put under that umbrella. But that may simply be my incorrect understanding of the term. I'm not disagreeing that it sucks, but merely saying that I didn't really think of it as "DRM". You don't have to tell me about the pitfalls of 'always online' ... I'm Australian so one unavoidable impact of this for me is having 300-400 ms of latency playing a 'single player' game (wish Blizz would get around to installing some local servers one of these years ... the AU/NZ market has got to be big enough to justify at least ONE server).

Separating the single player game from the (potentially) multiplayer game is a good idea ... I never thought about that but now that you mention it, it'd be a simple way of doing it. When creating a character you could be given the choice of creating a "local only" character, or an "online" character (only the online character could participate in multiplayer games and the auction house, but could still be played 'single player, but online' if you wanted.

Mind you, it'd suck if you created a "local only" character and got an awesome drop that you could have sold for $100s on the AH. I strongly suspect that Blizzard didn't go down this route not for nefarious "stop the pirates/hackers" reasons, but more because by forcing everyone to play online, there'd be a much wider range of equipment being dropped that could potentially be put on the RMAH. Since Blizz gets a cut of every transaction this is obviously in their interest.

Yeah I agree. In countries where they generally have always had caps, plans are often delivered at "whatever speed the infrastructure can support", and you pay for the download limit you want. The situation with Comcast differs in that you are being charged for speed tier, as well as volume downloaded. Furthermore, there isn't a range of different caps to choose from as there are in some other countries.

For instance, I'm on an ADSL2+ connection in Australia and have a cap. However, plans don't have any particular advertised speed (on DSL at least, cable or fibre is a different story) - they are simply "ADSL2+", which supports up to 24 Mbps down, and up to 2.5 Mbps up. The speed you actually get will be as fast as your modem can manage to sync, given your line length and condition. Some people with short phone lines will get the full 24 Mbps. Some with very long lines will only get a couple of Mbps. And most get somewhere in between ... but the point is you get as fast as your line will support.

The only choice you need to make with regards to your plan is how much download quota you want (and you can change this month to month to suit your needs). My ISP (Internode) currently offers 30 GB, 60 GB, 200 GB, 300 GB, 600 GB and 1.2 TB caps. I don't see caps as a bad thing IF you have a range of them to choose from, as it means low volume users who impact the network less can pay less, those that do use a lot pay more, and it helps the ISP predict and manage their network capacity to ensure a congestion-free experience (and for me, quality of connection is more important than the sheer amount I can download). Also note that once you go over your cap, you aren't charged more here ... they just throttle your speed down.

I don't know why everyone's talking about DRM. This isn't DRM ... it's not stopping you copying anything. Hell they put up the full client on their website for free. It's an online game that requires a server to run, that's all. It's like complaining than an MMO requires "always online" (well no kidding...!)

Virtually the whole game is run on the server ... the randomised level generation, mob spawning, pathing and behaviour, loot (as you say), even quest dialog ... EVERYTHING is done server-side. You might not like it done that way, but it's not DRM, it's just that the whole game is online. There are good reasons for this too (namely preventing item hacks/dupes and preserving the integrity of the market, which is doubly important now that there's a real-money AH), but 'DRM' or preventing people copying things or playing for free is NOT one those reasons.

There's a lot of cut scenes and and an absolute shit ton of audio files (every NPC's speech in the game, usually completely different for each of the 5 classes). 7.6 GB seems pretty right to me for all that. Hell if I compare it to the Aion MMO client I also have on my hard drive, which is 21 GB but contains virtually no video/cutscene material and nowhere near as much dialogue, 7 gigs seems light.

Except that the game itself is actually mostly run remotely. Your character is animated client side, but monsters, loot drops etc. are all calculated by the servers and sent to you ... not computed locally. So merely cracking the client isn't going to help - you would have to emulate the server as well.

For all intents and purposes D3 is a multiplayer game, not a single-player game. It just so happens that you can play by yourself (same as if you logged onto an MMO server and noone else happened to be on). At any time, someone else can log in and instantly join your game.

Plus the fact that all items are generated and stored server-side should at least nip item hacks in the bud.

Who said anything about education? Was merely pointing out that the size of their home continent is not one of the main reasons for low passport ownership. Less average days of vacation per year is a major factor ... which has nothing to do with them being "stupid" or "not well educated".

I think you're reading criticisms into my words that aren't there.

It's fair. The 4G frequencies supported by the new iPad (and used on US 4G networks) will never be used for 4G here in Australia. For good reason too: that part of the spectrum is occupied by television broadcasting!

"And Americans need passports much less because they can travel throughout a huge continent without one."

What's that got to do with anything? Australians have a huge continent they can travel throughout too, but near 90% of adult Australians have passports (and use them - one in four Australians goes overseas at least once a year). Similarly you don't need a passport to travel throughout the (large and diverse) Schengen Area in Europe, either, yet most Europeans carry passports.

No, Americans don't travel for various reasons (having crappy entitlements to paid leave from work compared to all other OECD countries is the major one), but merely having access to a large 'home' continent is not one of them.