Blizzard is ending support for Win XP and Vista

[Vulrax]

Why know tho?

[silberdrachi]

17 minutes ago, Vulrax said:

Why know tho?

assuming you are asking why now, its likely because they are working on something they couldn't verify as working in those OS and instead of devoting resources to fixing the issue they made the decision to drop support.

[Dabombinable]

And how rapidly would some one patch newer games from Blizzard to run on XP or Vista?

[handymanshandle]

@terrytek Well all it means is that if you install their games on those operating systems, it'll run but if you have issues they're going to basically "sorry you're using an unsupported OS", and anyways Windows 7 and 8.1 are better than XP and Vista.

[terrytek]

1 minute ago, wcreek said:

@terrytek Well all it means is that if you install their games on those operating systems, it'll run but if you have issues they're going to basically "sorry you're using an unsupported OS", and anyways Windows 7 and 8.1 are better than XP and Vista.

that's subjective. i tink windows vista was much better than 7, and definitely 8 since 8 had some stupid start screen.

[Bouzoo]

2 minutes ago, wcreek said:

@terrytek Well all it means is that if you install their games on those operating systems, it'll run but if you have issues they're going to basically "sorry you're using an unsupported OS", and anyways Windows 7 and 8.1 are better than XP and Vista.

 

According to the mentioned Community Manager:

Quote

After these older operating systems are no longer supported, the games will not run on them, so we encourage any players who are still using one of the older OSes to upgrade to a newer version. We’ll be rolling out this change on a staggered schedule, and will post further notices as we get closer to making the change for each game.

So you will either have to upgrade or they won't run at all. 

[handymanshandle]

1 minute ago, terrytek said:

that's subjective. 

Well no, in the objective. They're better simply because they have better security and stability, and not to mention are more widely used and supported.

 

Vista is objectively worse because of those things.

 

Your preference of Vista and XP is very much as subjective as my preference to Windows 8.1 and 10.

[handymanshandle]

1 minute ago, Bouzoo said:

 

According to the mentioned Community Manager:

So you will either have to upgrade or they won't run at all. 

Huh I didn't know that they were actually going to have it check for OS version to verify that it's running Windows 7 or newer. I thought they were just going to basically not give any official support to the games, not make them outright not work. Well I suppose if all you play are blizz titles and you're running an out of date version of Windows, then you probably should consider upgrading.

[Bouzoo]

4 minutes ago, wcreek said:

stability

I'd argue about that with Win 10 stability issues. *looking at you WATCHDOG_VIOLATION* Also by that logic, MS-DOS is the most stable OS ever build. 

[handymanshandle]

2 minutes ago, Bouzoo said:

I'd argue about that with Win 10 stability issues- *looking at you WATCHDOG_VIOLATION* Also by that logic, MS-DOS is the most stable OS ever build. 

Whatever 

[PlayStation 2]

[pretends to circlejerk over windows xp]

[Dabombinable]

14 minutes ago, wcreek said:

Well no, in the objective. They're better simply because they have better security and stability, and not to mention are more widely used and supported.

 

Vista is objectively worse because of those things.

 

Your preference of Vista and XP is very much as subjective as my preference to Windows 8.1 and 10.

Vista has better security than all of its successors, as does Windows 7. As for stability....Windows 10 screws up far more frequently and easily due to the forced updates. As for "widely supported"....as things stand, if it runs on Windows 7, it runs on Vista.

[handymanshandle]

1 minute ago, Dabombinable said:

Vista has better security than all of its successors, as does Windows 7. As for stability....Windows 10 screws up far more frequently and easily due to the forced updates. As for "widely supported"....as things stand, if it runs on Windows 7, it runs on Vista.

 

12 minutes ago, wcreek said:

Whatever 

 

[AlTech]

2 hours ago, Bouzoo said:

The truth is, except for personal preference, there is literally no reason to support an 11 year old OS which is the 4th oldest consumer edition at this moment (not counting Win 8 and 8.1 separately). 

Windows 8.1 was a service pack for Windows 8.

[Dabombinable]

3 minutes ago, wcreek said:

 

 

This is what your supposed to put:

 

[handymanshandle]

Okay fine, Ubuntu 16.04LTS Master Race. /s

[Bouzoo]

1 minute ago, AluminiumTech said:

Windows 8.1 was a service pack for Windows 8.

That's why I'm not counting them separately...? And I'm calling it always Win 8.1 because that's what 8 was supposed to be. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

2 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

No surprise. No need to support something outdated like such. Unnecessary and a waste. Same for APIs too. Moving on.

 

2 hours ago, Bouzoo said:

With 3 newer OS out, that's just wasting resources. I still think 8.1 is the best

Which resources? The word "support" is abused too much. No one needs to spend any resources on anything, that's fine by me. However, there is no good reason why a program that is currently running on a given OS should all of the sudden stop working. No updates, no technical service, that's all good. But disabling it actually require more "resources" than just letting it be, which is exactly costless. They are spending resources in depriving costumers of the games they paid for (I know, I know, all the EULA crap and blah blah blah). I could even see them closing the online gaming part to older OSes because they are changing whatever in the way the server works and so on, even if that reduces the functionality you originally got. I could see the "support" needed for that. The game not working at all is unacceptable. And the "security" bullshit card can't really be played in the context of games you can install from discs and play offline in your unconnected PC. What is so unsafe about playing single-player Starcraft II in any OS? Or is it their online DRM that became unsafe in some OS? It seems the lesson is once more that playing legal puts in you in a worse position than pirates.

2 hours ago, Bouzoo said:

This has been talked about much, but Vista was far better than people remember it.

The biggest problem was that Vista was installed (bundled) with PCs/Laptops that were underpowered at the time so it performed much worse than it actually was. If you were to install 7 or a newer OS on the same hardware, it would be chaos. 

No, actually that's what I did to bring my Vista laptop to a useful state: install Windows 7. And it's not about the initial release either, I survived 4 years with all its updates till 2012 on Vista before I could switch. Four golden years for that laptop since then.

49 minutes ago, wcreek said:

Huh I didn't know that they were actually going to have it check for OS version to verify that it's running Windows 7 or newer. I thought they were just going to basically not give any official support to the games, not make them outright not work. 

That's exactly the kind of "no support" that makes sense, and that would not imply that anyone needs to upgrade anything if all they plan to do is the same they are doing now.

However, the games no longer working implies that people need to change OS just to stay where they are. It's not going forward, it's just running in a hamster wheel.

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

No, actually that's what I did to bring my Vista laptop to a useful state: install Windows 7. And it's not about the initial release either, I survived 4 years with all its updates till 2012 on Vista before I could switch. Four golden years for that laptop since then.

Before I let my Mum give my Grandmother her old Vista laptop, I replaced the 250GB HDD with a 750GB HDD, installed a second stick of RAM for a total of 4GB and then installed Windows 7. Long story short, it runs far better now and its old 45nm 2GHz Pentium dual core no longer runs worse than the old Celeron M380 in her previous laptop (which also had 512MB RAM, a 60GB HDD and Windows XP Home).

[Bouzoo]

5 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Snip

Resources, as in human resources, time and money. Every new update has to be, atm, brought to XP and Vista. Take one time to axe the support and no problems (costs) in the future. I will go on a limb and say that they don't want to play with security breaches because someone is using XP in 2021 and look, there is a loophole and an acc got hacked. 

You seem to forget that Blizzard games need battle.net login to work. If you want to play offline game, then you will have to use pirated game. Correct me if I'm wrong, but even D2 and Starcraft need battle.net authorization.

As far as Vista, I still stand at my initital statement, Vista was not that bad, it was mostly the hardware at the time holding it back. There are always different cases, like yours. I had almost no issues for instance when I installed it on appropriate hardware. I'm having more problem with Win10 in fact. 

[marshmallowbam]

8 hours ago, Bouzoo said:

10 > 8(.1) > 7 > Vista > XP (5th)

actually xp was MUCH better than vista. at least with xp i didnt have to reset my OS every 4 months. god that crap got annoying really quickly.

[Bouzoo]

29 minutes ago, marshmallowbam said:

actually xp was MUCH better than vista. at least with xp i didnt have to reset my OS every 4 months. god that crap got annoying really quickly.

That was not basing them on how good they are, but how old/new they were. 

Also the general ruls is that if you install Vista (or newer OS) and XP on any system with a Dual Core and 2GB RAM and you will notice how xp was slow. Luckily, I didn't have the issues you mentioned. 

[Doobeedoo]

8 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

 

Which resources? The word "support" is abused too much. No one needs to spend any resources on anything, that's fine by me. However, there is no good reason why a program that is currently running on a given OS should all of the sudden stop working. No updates, no technical service, that's all good. But disabling it actually require more "resources" than just letting it be, which is exactly costless. They are spending resources in depriving costumers of the games they paid for (I know, I know, all the EULA crap and blah blah blah). I could even see them closing the online gaming part to older OSes because they are changing whatever in the way the server works and so on, even if that reduces the functionality you originally got. I could see the "support" needed for that. The game not working at all is unacceptable. And the "security" bullshit card can't really be played in the context of games you can install from discs and play offline in your unconnected PC. What is so unsafe about playing single-player Starcraft II in any OS? Or is it their online DRM that became unsafe in some OS? It seems the lesson is once more that playing legal puts in you in a worse position than pirates.

But there's just no point. Even they said so, almost no uses uses them, and I know they're the first that wouldn't sacrifice audience by doing something like this if they knew that they'd lose players. Same for web browsers, remember that Blizzard uses Battle.net and other social integrations too. And playing Starcraft 2 even offline on Vista or even XP? The game came out in 2010! You'd get that game and install decade old OS? If you're running such older OS you're running a security risk, not and OS!

 

[Yamoto42]

"Hell...It's about time."

-Tychus Findlay

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, Doobeedoo said:

But there's just no point. Even they said so, almost no uses uses them, and I know they're the first that wouldn't sacrifice audience by doing something like this if they knew that they'd lose players. Same for web browsers, remember that Blizzard uses Battle.net and other social integrations too. And playing Starcraft 2 even offline on Vista or even XP? The game came out in 2010! You'd get that game and install decade old OS? If you're running such older OS you're running a security risk, not and OS!

 

Lol, if you have any version of Windows installed your running a security risk-its just a bit less of a risk with Vista and 7 (security goes Vista>7>8.1>10, with ">" meaning greater than). And BTW, there is a difference between not supporting and suddenly blocking a version of an OS from running something that it by all means should run just fine (take the latest version of Diablo II-with an unofficial patch it can run perfectly under Windows 95 with full Glide support, despite Blizard no longer supporting it.

 

New requirements (you can't even launch the installer under 98 or ME): https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/Diablo-II-System-Requirements
Original requirements which apply once again with the unofficial patch, despite the update removing support : http://gamesystemrequirements.com/game/diablo-ii

And the funny thing is, I can build a machine with the minimum and recommended specs uite easily with the components that I have. I've got the CPU, and I can even match the RAM & CD ROM drive. And with Windows 9*, Diablo II runs better than it does under XP and Vista on the same hardware.