Diablo 3

[Grimmie]

Cripes, hello.

Oh, and for what it's worth Grimmie#2769

I wont get a chance to actually play till tomorrow though, most likely.

[spoodie]

I gonna buy this now, looks good (server issues aside) and I enjoyed the beta. I'm thinking direct from Blizzard for £45, but is there a significantly cheaper option around? Ideally without having to wait for something to be delivered to my house.

[Thompy]

I heard Tesco Extras had them on selves for £35. Good chance they're sold out now though.

[spoodie]

No joy at the Tesco near work, no PC games at all. Unsurprisingly.

[Dog Pants]

Fucking hell, am I the only one having issues installing this damn thing? After a 13 hour download I get the Windows pop-up telling me it may or may not have installed. I have to go root out the setup.exe (there's no launcher, it seems it didn't install at all), and now it's installing itself. Not automatically after download, or even as it downloads, like modern games. But not before it does its damn best to make me install to C, because clearly it needs to snuggle up to my OS. Also, why the fuck is a game which purportedly is mainly online 7.6GB?

[Wifeyberk]

Dogpants, everyone is having one issue or another, whether it be the actual installation or the logging on.

WoW login is taking a beating thanks to the D3 on battle.net too.

[Roman Totale]

Mine downloaded with no issues, but I couldn't get into the game at all last night. At least it's had the desired effect of stopping pirates from playing...

The Diablo forums were awash last night with people complaining of the poor customer service - not just the fact that the game wouldn't work, but the fact that Blizzard updates were conspicuous by their absence. Littered amongst those posts were people saying "stfu noobs you've obviously never been around for a game launch before. Fag!". Personally though I don't have a huge number of hours to wait around for a single player game to authenticate on a bombed out server. I mean, why did they bother doing the stress test in the first place?

Still, it's working now. Wish I hadn't played the beta now to be honest, as I'm already sick of that bloody cathedral.

Also one bonus of looking on the Diablo forums was finding this

[Dog Pants]

At least I'm having these issues for free then. Not that I'm ruling out buying it, I'm sure they won't last forever (and apparently they've already released a patch). I'm glad I didn't pre-order on the basis of early access though.

[HereComesPete]

Also one bonus of looking on the Diablo forums was finding this

~yup~

However, it is an quite the re-find and i've now tried various things about bacon, your mum and cocks in children so have this one

[Dog Pants]

Installed at last, character created, now can't play because it says 'connection interrupted'. I know I'm in no way unique, and since I'm only playing the demo I'm not really fussed, but seriously Blizzard? Is this an acceptable situation for a single player game?

[Roman Totale]

Is this an acceptable situation for a single player game?

Nope

[Joose]

I was having some issues (not major) yesterday, but its been issue free for me today. Even yesterday I only had one disconnection, and didnt lose any progress.

Its interesting that some people are having little to no issues whereas other people are getting bumfucked repeatedly. That doesn't make sense to me with it being a server load issue, it sounds more like some sort of bug that's only affecting certain hardware/software.

[Joose]

Oh, and...

Is this an acceptable situation for a single player game?

Clearly it is, as a whole lot of us have accepted it. Whether it *should* be acceptable or not is another thing.

[Dog Pants]

You've accepted it after you've bought it, you don't really have any choice. Ubisoft have been hammered for exactly the same thing, but Blizzard it seems are okay to do it.

[FatherJack]

Installed at last, character created, now can't play because it says 'connection interrupted'. I know I'm in no way unique, and since I'm only playing the demo I'm not really fussed, but seriously Blizzard? Is this an acceptable situation for a single player game?

Perhaps, while they're having troubles they are favouring the paying customers. Not the greatest strategy given the demo is supposed to sell the game, but in the long run satisfied susbscribers envangelising and inviting their friends will do more to attract further customers than a week one demo.

Taking aside the stupidity of this being a game you play alone, and being unconvinced that the always-on feature is more about the supposed clamour to avoid the cheating prevalent in the earlier releases than about making sure no-one dodges the auction house taxes, it's kind of what happens with every big WoW release isn't it? This game has to have a connection, always - we've known that for ages. With every WoW expansion or big patch, I basically didn't even bother trying to get on for about the first week, which was only partially solved by the background downloading and splitting of essential content - the actual login overload remained.

The amount of data transmitted during authentication and play is probably not that much less than WoW - the content and game assets (other than patches) are not delivered as you play, they are already present on your disk - it's only character's (and other object's) status, inventory and position that are being sent up and down. Admittedly WoW also has to deal with all the other player's stats such that they appear correctly in your game, but these are just a few simple numbers which tell the game engine how to render things you can see, not every mouse click or frame of animation.

Of course, I'm not saying it's acceptable, just that it isn't very surprising. No matter how much planning and testing you do it is hard to cope with massive spikes and surges in activity - even massively overpowering every component can still catch you out, and unless those overpowered components are virtual then you've blown a lot of money on something that will be largely redundant after the first week or two and the fervour dies down.

Or maybe, as an outsider to this release, I'm missing that it's actually far worse than even those WoW (or occasionally Steam) releases of old?

[Joose]

Ubisoft have been hammered for exactly the same thing, but Blizzard it seems are okay to do it.

Be fair; its not exactly the same thing.

D3 has been made with the focus on the co-op multiplayer and the auction house, both of which (although more the second one than the first) would be all fucked up by people cheating. To make sure cheating cant happen, all the maths is worked out server side (which incidentally is also the answer to your question about the big download. Its the graphics and sound and suchlike that takes up space, and that's all at your end.) This absolutely guarantees against cheating, but means you cant play it offline. The arguments for there being an "offline only" mode fall down when you realise that the whole game engine is written for a bunch of the work to be done server side. To make an offline mode you would essentially need to write two separate game engines for the same game. I can understand why they were less than keen to do that.

Ubisoft, on the other hand, have taken games that would work absolutely fine offline and slapped a net connection requirement on top.

Blizzard have done this in a misguided attempt to protect the player, Ubisoft have done it in a misguided attempt to protect their own wallet. That's why people are more pissed at Ubi than they are at Blizzard.

Or maybe, as an outsider to this release, I'm missing that it's actually far worse than even those WoW (or occasionally Steam) releases of old?

I can only speak to my own experience, but its really no worse than that. Better in fact. I remember WoW launching and being unable to log in for a week. At all. This has only been up a couple of days, and im playing just fine.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I suspect because the game is intrinsically linked with battlenet and such, that you need the connection there for that.

I was slightly miffed yesterday when I lost half a dungeon of progress due to a connection problem.

[Dog Pants]

Would it really be that hard to let my computer act as the server in single player? We only have Blizzard's word for that, and they managed pretty similar games just fine in Diablo 1 & 2. Out of interest how much of peoples' time has been spent in single player vs multiplayer? Is the multiplayer worth the inconvenience of having to be online to play the single player game? Is the auction house a huge boon to the game? Is Battlenet an essential part of the game?

[Joose]

Would it really be that hard to let my computer act as the server in single player?

God knows. Im guessing rather hard. Certainly harder than not doing it, anyway.

We only have Blizzard's word for that, and they managed pretty similar games just fine in Diablo 1 & 2.

Well, no, because D1&2 didn't have the auction house or anywhere near as well implemented multiplayer, which brings me to:

Out of interest how much of peoples' time has been spent in single player vs multiplayer? Is the multiplayer worth the inconvenience of having to be online to play the single player game? Is the auction house a huge boon to the game? Is Battlenet an essential part of the game?

Probably about 50:50, which for me is a shitload of multiplayer. Yes, I think so. No idea, not tried it (my guy instinct is no though). Fuck yes.

The fact that I can just click on a mates name on the main menu and seconds later im bashing demons with them is awesome. Off the top of my head I cant think of any other game where the ability to slip from playing solo to in a group and back is so quick and easy, and im including MMO's in that. Even in WoW, I can group up with whoever is online, but you tend to then spend the next few minutes trying to work out where each other are, then getting to the other person, then discovering that the other guy is 10 levels higher than you so you cant really group up anyway. In this its a couple of clicks to join someone's game, and then a click on a banner in the town to teleport directly to that person. And if it turns out that the other person is 10 levels higher than you it really doesn't matter: im not sure how it does it but it scales things so the higher level guy still has a bit of a challenge without the lower level guy getting pwnd. The multiplayer is extremely well implemented.

I would still have preferred not to spend most of the first day of owning the game staring at connection error messages, but now im in an its working it is totally worth it.

[FatherJack]

Would it really be that hard to let my computer act as the server in single player?

I don't think it would that hard, as like WoW I expect much of the code needed to run a renegade server could be gleaned from what's on your hard disk and if this goes on for a long time, I can see just that happening. Reconnecting to battle.net after connecting to one would probably be an insta-ban, of course.

I don't think that, as Joose suggests, there is a lot of processing (maths) done on the server as it would be a massive overhead, so what's probably happening is just verification that your machine and the server agree on basics like where you are and what you are carrying. Like a WoW instance, I expect a set list of objects and their location/contents is provided to your machine at the start, which your machine renders and mostly handles as you play through it. Periodically (and not always mandatorially all that often potentially, as Berk's experience hints) the server checks that you are roughly where you should be and only have stuff you should have - basically an inventory of you, the remaining items and the looted containers, plus a time check to make sure you're not speed-hacking. Any discrepancy and I expect you experience a "connection error". Which is like "cheating detected, except we know there are bugs so you probably aren't, but to be on the safe side we're resetting you". Your machine is essentially acting as a server in-between those scheduled checks.

It's clearly not on their roadmap to provide an offline-only mode, even one where any characters used would always be ineligible for online play, but I'm sure they could do it if they wanted to. Not doing it means they get more AH traffic. I don't mean that simply to condemn the AH, but also that apart from losing potential sales through it, they hobble any players who may have put hours into an SP-only character only to later want to play them online or buy an item for them.