Diablo 3: you can’t log-in and you shouldn’t care

Pat has the luxury of playing and writing about games? You make it sound like he hardly does a tap of work when in fact I think he’s working his arse off.

Also, I think it’s fair to say that first day problems only occur on the first day, so there’s no need for the cost and infrastructure needed when most of your fans will have the experience and patience to foresee the bottle-neck and wait it out.

Firstly, I just want to say that I know how difficult it is to get a game like this right at launch. I actually don’t, personally, have any issues with the problems Blizzard are experiencing at the moment.

The problem I have, Pat, is with your sweeping generalisations about gamers. Some choice examples from the above article:

“Save your bile for something that actually matters, like the fact you have little chance of achieving your life goals because you can’t stop playing computer games.”

“Stop sitting there repeatedly trying, and failing, to get a game, get off your ass and go for a walk. Maybe break into a run.”

I’m an avid gamer (I’m reading this site, right?) I also run marathons. Just what is your impression of what it means to be a gamer? Are you still stuck in the mindset of your fan base being cretinous troglodytes? How nice.

“Do some work. Radical, yes, but doing some work while you’re waiting for Blizzard to engineer one of the largest game projects yet created will make you feel better about your life. Write something. Build something.”

Once again, we’re all just lazy slobs that have no life outside of gaming, right? This is pretty shameful. You might be targeting the irate fools raging on YouTube about DIII not working, but the fact is, this is a (predominantly) offline game. You mention BF3 and MW3 but the issues there were centred on the fact that those games are renowned for their online experiences. The Diablo games? Not so much. People’s ire, in my opinion, is justified. You’re welcome to yours, too, naturally, but I take offence in how you’ve expressed it.

Spend time with my family? Believe it or not, I do. We do. I know you do. Why does a person who is disappointed with a service they paid for have to be one or the other? Why can’t those people be entitled to be pissed off and still be a decent human being who also loves their family, is fit and happy, and is productive and an all-round good guy?

You may be attempting satire but you have simply come across as out of touch, disrespectful and haughty to the extent that, that’s it, I’m out.

Good luck for the future.

I still love you, Pat.

@Ashwin: I think you’ve taken that whole piece in a far more serious light than it was written/intended mate.

You mean exactly how Pat took sexy characters in games far too seriously. Like that you mean? I think you mean like that.

How about this, why don’t you not try and play the game and instead uninstall the piece of shit and wait patiently for something better. Like Torchlight 2, or Grim Dawn or even Path of Exile.

Why are you so obsessed over Diablo 3 that you need to put up with one of the worst ideas I have ever heard of just to play the thing? Its not the previous games because the people that made that game pretty much all left. So what exactly is it?

I fucking loved Diablo 2 but the server side single player was such an awful idea that I made the choice to not buy the full thing. I managed it, I don’t feel as if im massively missing out now either.

“It wouldn’t go unpunished in any other industry.”

It would not go unpunished from another Publisher. Mark my words everyong playing right now might be fine with being online constantly at the moment but wait for some other publisher to attempt the samething, say EA. Then there will be a huge uproar, how dare they do this? On the EA Servers and everything!

Just because “Hey its Blizzard! I can deal with this! I MUST PLAY THE DIABLO. I MUST PLAY THE GAME.”

Now I’m one of the few of my friends who hasn’t complained alot.

However there are a few silly things from Blizzards site IMO. They’re one of THE largest gaming companies today. The release of Diablo 3 is nothing close to Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare and other games that have experienced problems on release. This is a game that people have been waiting about 10 years for. Now, they know what will happen once the game is released and so they can take many precautions to avoid it, people have patiently waited for 10 years…now many people will say “Then why not wait a few more days?”. This is not how it works, if people have payed for a game and the company behind it is BLIZZARD they should be able to prepare for this. I don’t know exactly how but there must be tons of solutions. They probably even have a whole team that’s been preparing for the launch for a long time.

It’s just silly that because “We’ve been through this before and it’s normally like this when a hyped game is release” means that companies shouldn’t do something about it?

It’s an issue that exist and it should be taken care of.

If you bought it, you deserve every little bit of it. You just help finance a stupid DRM system. And people saying this is not a singleplayer game: Are you stupid? If you can play it in singleplayer it is a singleplayer game.

Face it, there is no fucking reason for Blizzard to make the singleplayer always-online. This is exactly what was going to happen, Blizzard could’ve been smart, but they weren’t. One might think that they learned from all the BETAs and the time they wasted on WoW, but no such thing. It’s Blizzards fault and you shouldn’t blame people for wanting to play the game they payed for.

But again, if you bought it, you deserve it.

But Pat, really telling people to do some work and or exercise, or spend some time with their family? And then thanking Blizzard for that? If people wanted to do that they wouldn’t have spend their money on the game. I hope this whole article was meant as a joke, because otherwise it would be sad.

Haha. Loved the piece, absolutly fantastic!

While I do agree with many, that the trouble here is the games need to be online when I would have been thrilled to play offline Single Player. I don’t like that part at all. But in the end it isn’t the end of the world.

Instead of playing Diablo III during the peak hours last night, I ran some Heroic Dungeons in WoW with family. Even got a weapon upgrade for my Tanking Druid. All is good.

I bought it to play single player. Servers should be irrelevant, and as such your entire argument is invalid.

Not that I’ve complained much.

What i really love is that most game ‘journalists’ will go out and write gigantic ‘articles’ about the downtime of servers for games like BF3, but when it comes to Diablo 3? Spend some time with your family, you payed for it, after all!

All I will say is: Epic Patrick, love it Chill out people, just a game, you’ll be able to sink countless hours once the servers are fully patched

Some sage advice their for any ardent hobbyist *strokes chin*

Couldn’t agree more.

I said the exact same thing to a number of people I know yesterday.

They didn’t take it too well.

Yes, online games have patch launches, that’s fair enough. But this time round people are being locked out of the SINGLEPLAYER part of the game.
There is no need for any of this. It’s purely a DRM issue that Blizzard implimented so it can have a real money auction house.

It is the end game of always online DRM. People unable to play the game they bought. It is stupid. No other way to putt it.

There’s no excuse to shut paying players out completely. The single-player campaign should have been accessible immediately. But we all knew what Blizzard did here, and many of us went ahead and bought this shamefully restrictive game anyway. I did not. I will not. It’s not like there’s a shortage of good offline-capable games out there anyway.

I agree with the sentiment, but quite arguably there are a few buts to be thrown in there.

Of course it is one of the biggest games of the year, and of course there are gonna be bugs, when several million people swarm a system like bees on a caffeine rush.

That being said, with the implementation of the always-online DRM, Blizzard have made absolutely sure that every single glitch in the system, is apparent to everyone on the regional grid. When it crashes, every single player is going to feel it.

You wouldn’t care if you were deprived of updates or instant messaging playing a singleplayer game, that wasn’t totally dependent on developer-run servers, but now you do. That’s Blizzards choice, not ours.

That’s arguably not very clever if you want to look like you know what you’re doing, which is point two. Blizzard are modern day wizards of networking. Throughout the years they’ve become one of the most reliable and expedient developers out there, when it comes to fixing, maintaining and tuning their network, and making sure people get as much playtime as humanly possible.

In light of that, I’d say the notion that Diablo 3 isn’t entirely ready to face the world makes for a huge embarrassment. That’s below par.

I think it’s too early to call it as such, though. I was logged in and playing within an hour and twenty minutes, and I think that’s to be expected for a gargantuan launch. But if the service keeps crashing, Ubisoft style, then they have a serious problem, and really, while we might appeal to our better nature, they’re still the ones responsible.

@52 To be fair, D2 and D3 were always developed to be online coop games. They actually weren’t tailored to be singleplayer games.

If people don’t want to support this kind of DRM, don’t buy the game.

It’s called “voting with your wallet”.

A person can’t rightly criticize this problem if they’re against it but paid up anyway. Anyone who knew anything about the game knew it would require an always-on BNet connection, even in “single-player”. If you didn’t, well… ignorance isn’t a privilege. Research the things you want as a consumer, or you only have yourself to blame.

I need Steam to play countless of single-player games. If its down, I can’t access them. What exactly is the difference here? Oh right, there isn’t any.

And if you can’t go buy a single day without playing a game (especially at launch when the problems are the worst), the problem isn’t with Blizzard. They’re obviously going to do what they can to stabilize things as quickly.

I think Tycho over at Penny Arcade said it best:

“We need to think for a second about the extent to which this supposedly carefree fucking dialectic enables these precise abuses. No, actually; it is not okay that the definitive Game Developer can’t make their shit work. Is it as bad as the Foreclosure Crisis? I don’t know, probably not; but nobody is talking about that. There isn’t a list of things that we have to worry about in order. We can decide on a case by case basis whether or not something is bullshit, and then we can feel some way about it, and we don’t need to wait for a transmission from central command to know if we’ve paid in enough psychic penance to enjoy something.”
http://www.penny-arcade.com/

Also, you do NOT need to be online to acces Steam, you can simply start it in offline mode and play your games that don’t require an online DRM system.

@67 People aren’t complaining about the system, they’re complaining about the fact that it keeps cutting out.

Damn, Diablo III is short. I almost completed it.

You know what will take the cake, if one of this days a big burst of solar flare shutdown the internet for a couple of months or years, and then you see the diablo 3 logo on the computer, but hey you cannot play it, but the solution is pretty simple turn to all the games that didnt have this kind of scheme.

Know i now this will be coming to the consoles in the next gen, because sadly it will also go with the always connected route, now i wonder why they would take such a wild idea for the next gen***looking at the diablo 3 sales numbers*****

@71

If that were to happen we would have bigger issues than playing games…

#72, Oh yes defenitively that will be a dire and extreme situation for humankind, but i did tried to point out some of the things that are wrong with it with an extreme example, but hey besides a big hugh my family, the best way to go will be playing games man, and with my family also, 8D

I think that people have a right to complain about a non working product, generally.
In this case, NO, if you bought this game with out checking around it is your fault. If you have read a single article about D3, then you must have come a cross someone predicting day 1 fail due to the online thing.

Don’t feed the monkeys and then complain they threw poop at you, READ the frigin sign.

The point is, is that people paid their hard-earned money for a product that they should be able to play on release day. There is no excuse for this. Blizzard has money. Blizzard even operates an MMORPG, with over 10 million active subscribers. They had a beta. They definitely had projections for sales numbers. Even if they were unsure of the player hit, they should have had backup servers on the ready.

And they defend their online DRM, and aren’t prepared for launch day? This is exactly everyone’s fear; with always online DRM like this, we are at the mercy of the company’s servers.

If I bought a television, a vehicle, a bicycle, or whatever, the company guarantees it will work. And its state of operation is not contingent on whether or not they are able to sustain its operation. Anyways, I’m rambling. We paid our money, the product should work. Period.

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I spent my time on other things, as I usually do. I don’t game nearly as much as I used to. But the point is in the principle.

“I bought a television, a vehicle, a bicycle, or whatever, the company guarantees it will work.”

But they can’t guarantee that the cable television will be up and running, or stop the tires from bursting.

Even the best servers in the world can only handle so much. You can’t just “get more servers” or “make it work”.

@76

“But they can’t guarantee that the cable television will be up and running, or stop the tires from bursting.”

Really? That’s totally besides the point. You’re reading way too far into my analogy. (A tire can be replaced, by me, very quickly. And negligence on my part would likely be the cause of it bursting. The cable service provider has nothing to do with my functional television. I could use a television for a multitude of things).

—-

“Even the best servers in the world can only handle so much. You can’t just ‘get more servers’ or ‘make it work’.”

I still fail to see how that’s an excuse. This is a company that had a net income of over a billion dollars last year. They need to have the server capacity. If this were some indie developer who couldn’t afford it, that would be a different story entirely.

But when they’re requiring their users to be constantly connected, and have been so steadfast in their defence of this technology, they have to be sure that they’re ready for anything. If they can’t be, then they shouldn’t rely on this DRM. The consumer shouldn’t get shafted because of a company’s lack of foresight.

They hyped the launch up so much. It’s obvious people were poised to line up for the game, just as they did for Starcraft II, or would for any WoW expansion. Plus, they had the approximate number of day one sales from their digital distribution platform. They tout how the game is set to unlock right after midnight, and have their whole community ready to burst through the door… Of course the reason for this fallout is easy to comprehend, and it’s quite justified, in my opinion.

Personally, it doesn’t bother me that I wasn’t able to play right away. It’s not like I was up at midnight waiting, and whatnot. I have school during the day, and other things that take precedence.

It’s just disheartening to see a prestigious company handle a launch like this, when, in the past, there have been clear examples of this happening with launches of other big releases. I think we’ve gotten to a point when server capacity shouldn’t be an issue, or an excuse, anymore.

@77 Like I said, even the best servers in the world are going to crumble of the amount if data trying to be pulled in and out is too excessive. This is one game that’s probably being hammered by millions of requests a second. There *isn’t* a server alive that can handle that. And Blizzard has some of the best servers in the world.

It’s not just singular servers either. There’s servers for account logins, servers for achievements, servers for the other games on B.Net. You seriously underestimate how much strain is being put on them.

I laugh when people think there’s some sort of magic solution. There isn’t. The only solution is less strain. And that’s only going to stop when less people are hammering the servers all at once.

It will work fine in a couple of days, and then nobody will give a fuck.

I paid $60 to enjoy a single-player game, and I’ve been completely unable to do so.

So don’t tell me I have no right to complain.

Don’t characterize my complaints as “whining.”

And do NOT patronize me (or the rest of your readership) by telling us to “spend time with family.”

Who the hell do you think you are?

This article is insulting, and I don’t even care about Diablo 3.

@80
Sadly true. I love VG247 articles and specially Pat’s work but unless this was meant to be sarcastic, the whole thing is rather insulting, specially the reasoning and the suggestions at the end.
Heck, even GameCritics.com called VG247 / Pat on this one. Really shameful.

When there is a singleplayer game that you pay 60 bucks for, you should NOT have to suffer through server and other stupid issues because of the whole disgusting “always-on-line” thing.

It went down again.

You are kidding right Pat? We paid money to enjoy a game. Blizz’s botched launch and subsequent inability to address issues are not allowing us to do that.

Go eat a bag of dicks and enjoy your under the table blizz check.

This bit clued me in to fact that this entire article is sarcasm…
“most amazing addition to the action-RPG genre”

…regardless of whether the sarcasm was intentional or not.