Server Issues Mar Diablo III's Launch

[Eggbert]

No way. The always-online DRM bullshit is getting in people's way? Well, I never would have expected that precise thing to have happened. I mean, DRM never gets in the way of legitimate customers; it's there to keep the pirates from playing the game. It's not like there've been any other companies who've taken flak for getting in the way of legitimate customers before. That'd be ridiculous.

inb4 "It's not DRM, it's there to prevent cheats". Right, because there's no way to just let people run separate singleplayer in an offline mode. That borders the brink of sheer madness.

 

[Zer_]

'cept it didn't. You could play SC2 in offline mode.

You could? I thought Battlenet 2.0 made that impossible. Oh well.
As I said, I haven't played any of the Blizzard games after Frozen Throne, so my understanding is only second-hand.

You could most definitely play it in offline mode and, contrary to what PercyBoleyn said, you could do so on your account and not need a guest account. I have done so when my internet was down.

Yep. You didn't get achievements or anything of the like, but who cares. At least the functionality was there.

In Diablo 3, drops are server-side. That's to prevent people from getting data about items, coming up with duping methods, then ruining the market. Like in Diablo 2.

You can easily compartmentalize, as in retain server side drops while providing drops client side in a separate file for single player.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Entirely non-unexpected. I'm just downloading the client now, and I'll wait a few days for the excitment to die down before I start off with it.

Sort of considering doing a Let's Play. I generally suck at Diablo, so it'd be amusing if nothing else.

 

[Wuvlycuddles]

Diablo died when Blizzard North was closed and dispersed.

Fortunately we have Runic, who are pretty much the same thing and they are bringing us Torchlight 2 in the not too distant future.

 

[Inkidu]

No way. The always-online DRM bullshit is getting in people's way? Well, I never would have expected that precise thing to have happened. I mean, DRM never gets in the way of legitimate customers; it's there to keep the pirates from playing the game. It's not like there've been any other companies who've taken flak for getting in the way of legitimate customers before. That'd be ridiculous.

inb4 "It's not DRM, it's there to prevent cheats". Right, because there's no way to just let people run separate singleplayer in an offline mode. That borders the brink of sheer madness.

Can I hug you? That was awesome!

 

[TheRealCJ]

i remain unsurprised

since you know, this happens every time any thing 'online' launches

Breaking News: Popular game is popular.

And wow, we're about 9 posts in and already the stuck-up anti-DRM cretins have crawled out of the woodwork to whine.

disappointing isn't it, you'd think they'd have something better to do.

Yeah, they should stop complaining and just enjoy playing the new game they just bough- ooooh...

 

[Cecilthedarkknight_234]

gee I wonder if it was good idea to make this online only now blizzard. I would have more sarcasm to throw around, however it's been covered enough so far.

 

[Xan Krieger]

2 things here. The first thing is you'd think a company famous for it's MMORPG with millions and millions of players would be able to handle millions and millions of players on launch day. Secondly what benefit is there to have to stay connected to play single player? I bet if people didn't have to do that that there'd have been no server problems.

 

[Eggbert]

*snip

Can I hug you? That was awesome!

Aw, thanks! Rock Paper Shotgun's also got a great comment thread to read on the "emergency" fix post.

 

[luckshot]

i feel bad for the people that want to play it, also glad that i did not buy it.

but seariously why are games that require an always online connection of this type (phone home) having this problem,especially from a big publisher? did they not look into how many people pre ordered and make an educated guess as to how much stress their servers would be under and take appropriate action?

Sonic 4: Episode II may not be a great game, but right now it holds the distinct advantage of being a playable game. It looks like I chose the right May 15 game to preorder.

P.S. Thanks

this had me chuckling for a good five minutes when i saw it

 

[Carnagath]

People still have trouble logging in? That went away, in the EU at least, about 3 hours after launch. The more current problem is that today during peak hours (evening to midnight), the game was laggy. And I don't mean 200 ms, I mean 500+, making it practically unplayable.

 

[Lord_Jaroh]

What's the chances there will be a crack so you can play it without a internet connection by the end of this month?

Zero. All of the drops, and enemy spawns are server side. Without it there is no game.

Bets? Within 3 months there will be a offline server setup. Within 6 it will be indistinguishable from blizzard's setup, and within a year the server will be moddable.

I hope to god that this is the truth.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I wonder when some industrious person will make an offline hack so people who bought this game will be able to play it?

I'm happy with Star Wars and City of Heroes. Let me know when Blizz stops screwing over its "much appreciated" customers.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

Breaking News: Popular game is popular.

And wow, we're about 9 posts in and already the stuck-up anti-DRM cretins have crawled out of the woodwork to whine.

Being "for" pro-consumerism doesn't make you stuck-up or indie. It has a singleplayer component that requires you to not only log in to play, but to maintain a connection because AI and attack algorithms are handled by the server as well. Honestly, if you're not even SLIGHTLY angry that Blizzard thinks that's a good thing to have, as apposed to an appalling waste of resources and bandwidth, you have to rethink your affiliations.

 

[Lunar Templar]

i remain unsurprised

since you know, this happens every time any thing 'online' launches

Breaking News: Popular game is popular.

And wow, we're about 9 posts in and already the stuck-up anti-DRM cretins have crawled out of the woodwork to whine.

disappointing isn't it, you'd think they'd have something better to do.

Yeah, they should stop complaining and just enjoy playing the new game they just bough- ooooh...

or any game really.

don't get when people complain when it doesn't effect them.
not saying some of the people complain aren't effected by this, just that a lot of them seem to have had no interest in playing it to begin with and are going 'see?!' to act superior or something.

and i've had enough time to get a demon hunter to 10 and a barb to 9 so its not that bad (i take the time to explore every nook and crany)

 

[tzimize]

Never understand how companies constantly underestimate the amount of players who will want to play games like this on launch day. Blizzard should have expected this to happen.

And you can't even play the single player because you have to be constantly connected to the internet for playing what should be an "offline" mode.

Just more examples of how companies underestimate the amount of players that will log in to their games and how DRM simply doesn't work.

Tbh, I expected launch day to be like this. And thats saying something. I did not trust blizzard to pull off a good launch, I expected servers would be shit.

And thats pretty sad. I expect to get bad service, I expect to not be able to play the game I've paid for. Where is Jim Sterling when you need him? :<

 

[halfeclipse]

Heh, seems that the hamster hasn't so much fallen off the wheel as it got catapulted out of it and bounced around the room for a while. All of battle-net is currently down.

What all the wisecracks seem to forget:
These issues aren't at launch, they are several hours after launch, during the first peak hour the game is released.

This isn't some kind of super-rush on the servers at 00:00, it is completely expectable traffic

Except for midnight launches most game stores open at around 9-10 am and then there's people getting off work, out of school etc. Also time zones. Launch "hour" is more along the lines of 12-24 hours long.

For those mentioning blizzard taking down the D3 servers eventually. They still have the Diablo 2 and StarCraft servers up and those games are ancient. I wouldn't expect them to pull the plug on these servers for another 10-20 years.

And what about in, say, 50-60 years time?

I would assume the same kind of person who would watch films made in the 50s in 2012. But I guess that sounds equally ridiculous to you right? Why should we bother to make our media and entertainment last?

Imagine if a game like Super Mario Brothers had this shit in it. People still play that game today and I bet still will be in decades to come because it's a great game.

Oh man yea, imagine if I wanted to boot up an original copy of Spacewar!
Err no wait, things have changed so much there's exactly one computer in the world able to run it

Let's try Vette! instead, that's only 20 or so yeas old after all. I'm sure it'll require a whole bunch of fuckery well beyond the average computer user for it to run, but that's fine. I'll just pop this floppy dis.... oh wait no.

Well what about Dungeon Keeper 2? That's about 10 years old so it comes on a CD. Installs happily, boots up but all sorts of colour issues... and oh look it just crashed to desktop for no reason at all.



But no, you're so right net connection is going to be the biggest problem with playing Diablo 3 50 years from now.

 

[Nikolaz72]

The servers are down, when trying to connect to the server it doesnt say disconnected, it says password is wrong.

Millions of people go onto the website for account managing and serverstatus check to reset their password. Website for server status checking goes down.

Diablo 3 status.

Website - Down.
Servers - Down.

Great job Blizzard. You 'really' know how to handle a launch. You just couldnt wait that one week more and fetch a couple of new servers for the initial rush.

 

[DeadlyYellow]

You know, I can't help but wonder if opening the game to preloaders a few days early would have had most of the bugs worked out by the time the store-boughts got on.

 

[TheMadTypist]

Well absolutely nobody saw this coming. But, within a day or so, they'll get it mostly up again and they'll be off and running. Then they'll release a statement about how "thrilled" they are by the "record demand for Diablo III", perhaps along with a rough estimate for how many bajillions the game's sale has brought in and some initial figure to show the real-money auction house is already active, rounding up with a reminder for "those few still experiencing difficulty logging onto battle.net" to submit support tickets and thanking everyone for their enthusiasm. Then wooo, off it rockets into the stratosphere to hang out along with SC2 or even WoW in popularity for the next decade. I don't like what they did with D3 (and as a result just didn't bother buying it) but before long all this fuss will just be forgotten and the people who like D3 will be playing it and the people who don't, wont.