Blizzard Apologizes for Diablo III Launch Troubles

[DaRigger420]

I used to play Diablo III....... then I took an Error37 to the knee!

 

[Scarim Coral]

As long they stop the sever full, queue in to wait and the disconnection during gameplay then it's all good but I hardly doubt they will fix those two problems.

 

[Seydaman]

Looks like pirating a game these days gives you a more pleasurable experience then dropping the dough for it.
i bet johnny pirate has none of these issues.

Doubt it, with games like D3 the crack is probably a bit finicky, if it works at all.

I find it weird how much people are hating the game based on server issues. People are so hateful of something they haven't played

Enjoying it, I am.

 

[Seydaman]

Shitty, rushed game made by soulless corporate drones who have no concern about the quality of the game they make or consumer satisfaction is shitty.

Personally I can't wait till they release Diablo III Gold which, for a nominal monthly fee, will allow you access to a higher quality server with better drop rates and exp multipliers as well as two new classes only available to Gold membership holders.

Did you play the game?

No?

Then shut up and don't say it's shitty without having played it. Rushed? It took 10 years to release, and was announced in... 2008 or 2009? That's not rushed.

I remember problems Half Life 2 had after release. Game was unplayable not for the first few hours, like D3, but DAYS.

D3 was unplayable for the first 24 hours for the majority of people.

It wasnt even remotely 24 hours. The servers were up for Asia and EU less than 3 hours after launch and stayed up for the rest of the day. The Americas servers took a bit longer, but once they were up they were up the rest of the day.

I can attest to that, when I woke up on the 15th I played without problems, only was off for a few hours because of patching.

 

[Marowit]

I was just surprised they had so many server issues after having WoW running for all these years. All jokes aside, their expansion-launches are usually pretty smooth in terms of millions of people all clicking login at the same time.

 

[Wertornion]

I had no issues at all, and I logged in at 5 pm EU. No disconnects at all, just that my first session had no achievements. For me that's no problem I'm going to plan again anyway.

I finished my first playthrough yesterday and I'm loving it.

 

[Baresark]

Meh. My buddy played all day at my house till I had to go to work, then went home and was not able to play at all. That sucks for him. But it did confirm one thing for me. They made no improvements since I played that open beta weekend, meaning the game was still boring.

Again this same misconception that bad press keeps propagating.
Diablo 3 uses server ran game system.

It doesn't mean I'm saying it is not DRM, quite the opposite, DRM is a feature of server ran games. Among many other things. But there is one mayor distinction.

DRM in server ran games is not an optional requirement, it is pretty much mandatory. Blizzard has clearly explained that Diablo 3 is a server ran game. So you really have no basis in hoping they can "drop it". You have to decide weather a server ran game is for you only.

But removing the log in requirement ... Pretty much not gonna happen. It would compromise RMAH and no company is dumb to actively cause fraud in real money systems. That crap is real and has legal consequences, unlike fake gold.

It's not bad press propagating this information, all gaming press has posted articles on this particular subject since D3 came out. This was an article about their apology to their customers. But the author is making a valid point. A lot of people had problems and they are problems that never need even exist.

As far as compromising the RMAH, a lot of people feel this should not even exist either. And it wouldn't compromise it, it couldn't happen without it being exclusively online. The issue is that a lot of people feel that it should not have server side elements when you are not playing it online (not online in the sense that you are not playing with or against other human beings and only following the story). There are no advantages to this system what so ever, though they did talk a big game about the "advantage" of this when they first announced it. But peoples bullshit alarms started going off immediately. I'm sure you recall this, but they said the big advantage was not having to keep separate online and offline characters separate. So you can always jump online with your character. Though, last I checked, not too many people care that much about this.

I guess my point is that there so far has been no advantage at all for it hosting elements such as loot drops and monster spawns server side. To the contrary, there have been disadvantages for many people. All they are really doing is collecting consumer bad will, which is too bad. One day in the future they may release a game that is not boring and it would be a shame for people to miss it.

All of that said, soon enough they will have all the issues solved and this conversation will disappear. Though it will show up occasionally when Blizzard announces something in the future.

 

[Andy Shandy]

all the beauty and grace of a wildebeest careering over a cliff. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/117262-Server-Issues-Mar-Diablo-IIIs-Launch]

I can't have been the only one hoping that this was a link to a gif to a wildebeest carerring off a cliff, was I?

Damn you Escapist,
When you have a hyperlink titled "wildebeest careering over a cliff." I expect, nay, demand a funny video to that effect.

Yours Sincerely,

Happy_turtle

Obviously not. High five! =D

Thought this picture was well done by the way

 

[Baresark]

People need to realize that you cannot "pirate" a functional game at this point. That may change in the future as someone may build a fake server for it, but as of now they have not.

 

[PingoBlack]

I guess my point is that there so far has been no advantage at all for it hosting elements such as loot drops and monster spawns server side. To the contrary, there have been disadvantages for many people. All they are really doing is collecting consumer bad will, which is too bad. One day in the future they may release a game that is not boring and it would be a shame for people to miss it.

All of that said, soon enough they will have all the issues solved and this conversation will disappear. Though it will show up occasionally when Blizzard announces something in the future.

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.

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).

 

[Aggieknight]

It wasnt even remotely 24 hours. The servers were up for Asia and EU less than 3 hours after launch and stayed up for the rest of the day. The Americas servers took a bit longer, but once they were up they were up the rest of the day.

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.

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.

 

[Baresark]

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.

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 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.

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.

 

[upgray3dd]

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.

 

[PingoBlack]

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.

Yeah, I always respect an informed buyers decision. 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.

 

[The.Bard]

Well Blizzard
Maybe you should have just not made a connection required to play single player, than you wouldn't have such a large problem
Jeez, they waste all that money doing it, and it won't stop piracy at all, what was even the point?

Imagine "Monsters Inc," but replace screams with rage. It's what all the 24k solid gold yachts run on in California.

 

[Baresark]

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.

Yeah, I always respect an informed buyers decision. 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.

 

[Genixma]

They apologized. For something that they said would happen. Which did happen. And now they're saying they're sorry for something that inevitably happened?

Huh...

 

[PingoBlack]

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.

In EU it took us about 1 to 2 hours of attempts to log in on that first BWE. 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.