Blizzard Apologizes for Diablo III Launch Troubles
- Thread starter The Wooster
- Start date
Recommended Videos
There are disadvantages, I am making that clear myself. There is no denying that server based games have a weak point with authentication, it is a very obvious choke point. And we have seen this with some regularity when games launch, recent examples being Guild Wars 2 beta weekend.Baresark said:
However, there are many advantages. Authentication for example allows beter tracking of transactions, so item duplication is made much harder, as is identity spoofing.
That being said, Blizzard never said Diablo 3 is a singleplayer game. People assumed that based on Diablo 2. Diablo 3 is an online co-op, more comparable to Guild Wars one than Diablo 2.
As much as I agree with your point about disadvantages, Blizzard at least never lied about how Diablo 3 is designed. They made it clear this will be server ran game with no local server emulation (which again many people like to call "offline mode" not completely accurately).
I can't speak for EU or Asia, but last night was the first time I've been able to successfully log in and play the game. And I ended up getting kicked off three times over the course of 2 hrs; once for 20 minutes. I "played" between 9PM and 11PM EDT. My friends playing the game all had significant issues last night. It was very frustrating. We are all professionals that have jobs, wives and families, so the ability to play our game of choice when we have the time is very important.shintakie10 said:
Personally, I had significant reservations regarding the "always on" requirement for a game that I will mostly play single player, but had a strong expectation that if anyone could do it, Blizz could. I was sadly mistaken.
Now I am looking forward to not being able to play the game once a week for several hours while system maintenance is being performed, log-in server outages, and outages caused by required patches.
I may be overreacting but it is likely my disappointment with Blizz, a company that I have a >20 year relationship with, clouding my judgement.
I agree with you completely. They never said it would have an offline mode. Things like item spoofing and save editing, in a single player game do not matter at all. There is no reason prevent JohnnyX from duping items on his private single player experience. If that is what he wants to do, he should be able to do it, all the objections about it "ruining" the game aside. I wouldn 't personally consider that an advantage. As Blizzard stated, the advantage is not having to have a separate character for online, but as someone who doesn't care about online features, that is meaningless.PingoBlack said:
I wouldn't compare it to GW2 myself. In GW2, you run into other players by virtue of a shared world. In this, you have to go out of your way to be around other players. I guess I would compare it more to Demon's Souls in the way the world is set up, but without all the cool messages from other players, but also (thankfully enough) without all the invasions from other players as well.
But, as you say, none of this was a secret. It simply kept me from buying the game.
Either I was just lucky, and the game had some MAJOR problems for a bunch of people outside my circle of friends, or all the game journalists really love reporting on Diablo 3 messing up. Everyone I know was in in ten minutes, powered through normal, and are currently logging in and out at their leisure without issue.
I do hope the expansion has an offline mode, though. It's not like people could pirate it, it's an expansion to one of the online-only virtually unpiratable games.
I do hope the expansion has an offline mode, though. It's not like people could pirate it, it's an expansion to one of the online-only virtually unpiratable games.
Yeah, I always respect an informed buyers decision.Baresark said:
Thumbs up.BTW, I compared D3 to original Guild Wars game, it only had shared city hubs and chat. Game wise those two are remarkably similar in structure. Always online games, server ran but supportive of solo play, with city hubs and chat centers being only places where you met other players.
But I did compare log in server crush to Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend event. As that thing also generated a lot of QQ.
And I will also say it here, kudos to Arena Net as well. Both companies took log in server issues very seriously and reacted fast to at least alleviate them.
I got ya. I misunderstood. I didn't realize there were references to both GW games in that post. Sorry about that. I should be in less of a hurry I think, haha. Yeah, I heard about problems with the GW2 beta weekend, but I was lucky enough not to experience any issues at all that weekend, and I loved the game. Yes, Arenanet did an awesome job that weekend. I can't wait for the next beta which will hopefully have those other two races available.PingoBlack said:Yeah, I always respect an informed buyers decision.Baresark said:
BTW, I compared D3 to original Guild Wars game, it only had shared city hubs and chat. Game wise those two are remarkably similar in structure. Always online games, server ran but supportive of solo play, with city hubs and chat centers being only places where you met other players.
But I did compare log in server crush to Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend event. As that thing also generated a lot of QQ.
In EU it took us about 1 to 2 hours of attempts to log in on that first BWE.Baresark said:
But Monday stress test, not a hitch. I respect them both for working hard and fast on fixing the issue.I also expect some people will have an issue with this and Path of Exile. It is also always online, but also F2P with item shop. The log in crunch could be epic with all the anti-D3 people jumping on that boat.
I hope the people will have patience and understanding in buckets, small indy firms can rarely invest resources like Anet and Bliz into server capacity.
Dude, not cool. With words like that, I expect to the link to go to a video of an actual wildebeest careening over a cliff. Color me disappointed.Grey Carter said:
Perhaps if you had bought HL2 digitally you might have been stuck in that position (I honestly can't remember now) but anyone who bought a physical copy was able to install and play the single player even without being able to authenticate with Valve's servers right away. I was playing the game for hours on release day without it ever getting through to the servers.Abedeus said:
Plus, as someone pointed out, it was the first time a game had really done something like that. But it's 8 years later and one of the biggest companies in the business releasing one of the biggest titles of the year doesn't have a sweet clue how many servers and bandwidth they need on day 1? That's pretty pathetic to be honest. If anything, they should be temporarily renting more than they think they need because spending a bit more money than necessary is always preferable to this kind of bad press. People shouldn't have to wait more than a day to be able to play their game because they didn't want to overspend on servers.
EYE NO, RITE?Genixma said:
The finer points of this can be put up for debate ad nauseam, it won't change the fact that things happened more or less as Blizzard expected they would. They handled the situation as they expected they'd need to, and things have pretty much calmed down, now.
What really bothers me is when people drop "This isn't a single-player game!" as a justification for always-online authentication. It doesn't work that easily, folks. Consider that until I click "Open Game to Public", I'm effectively on my lonesome in a corner of some server dedicated to North American players. Until I make that mouse click or choose to join someone else's game, I'm effectively "offline", in terms of overall functionality. The only online components remaining are the server-side drop resources and the data for whatever bits of randomized events still remain. I'm virtually letting Blizzard suck my bandwidth just so it can confirm I'm not a nasty, filthy pirate.
Honestly, the only good side I can find in all this is essentially allowing for an easier experience in Internet cafés. You have to give up your current station? Fine, log out and go log in somewhere else. Your Demon Hunter's going to be sitting there, waiting for you.
If that's the case, then there's probably an alternate universe out there where a genius at Activision went "Hey, you know what? Let's ask Valve to host our game on Steam! They've got a DRM solution all patched up and generally tolerated by their consumer base - folks will love us for allowing us to add D3 to their Steam accounts!"
But, yeah. It obviously seemed simpler to just throw money at an independent server-based authentication method, because they probably got scared by how easy it is to take a downloaded Steam game's folder and crack the executable and the steam_api.dll file.
Repackage the whole deal in a commercially available installer, post this up on a torrent site, and you're done. Yeah, I can see them rejecting Steam based on that.
They dug their own grave on this one with the always on DRM. But of course they couldn't learn from other people's mistakes (Ubisoft) and realize always on DRM is both unnecessary and cruel to your paying customers. I won't publicly endorse piracy but I can guarantee the guys who stole this game don't even know what any of these problems are.
Handfull of people didn't have any log-in problems so the issue is overblown and pointless. Everyone, EVERYONE i know who bought it day one were having problems most of yesterday too, but it was reported england was one of the worst hit areas.
Long story short, if you got on, lucky you but it doesn't invalidate anyone elses grievences. Stay classy Escapist users, i'm going back to 4chan. It's nicer.
Long story short, if you got on, lucky you but it doesn't invalidate anyone elses grievences. Stay classy Escapist users, i'm going back to 4chan. It's nicer.
I knew there would be problems at launch. I had trouble getting in for maybe the first hour and a half, but ever since I got on a couple of days ago I've had no problems getting back on at all and once in the game I've had no latency problems and have never been kicked from the game.
Although I did manage to kick my friend from the game. He finally got on after hours of trying, I invited him to a party and my invite kicked him and he couldn't get back in again. I thought it was hilarious. He didn't.
Although I did manage to kick my friend from the game. He finally got on after hours of trying, I invited him to a party and my invite kicked him and he couldn't get back in again. I thought it was hilarious. He didn't.
I love how the argument here is this:
Person A says, "I got screwed the the majority of other players trying to simply play this game, this is horrible customer service"
Person B says, "I played the game with ease so Blizzard obviously did nothing wrong and everyone who's complaining needs to shut up."
Person B's argument is laughable.
Person A says, "I got screwed the the majority of other players trying to simply play this game, this is horrible customer service"
Person B says, "I played the game with ease so Blizzard obviously did nothing wrong and everyone who's complaining needs to shut up."
Person B's argument is laughable.