Diablo III is Hell: A Personal Story

DIABLO III IS FINALLY HERE!!!

Ahem… The long awaited Diablo III launch day is over and done with, but I’m not sure how many people actually got to play the game yesterday. If you have a copy of the game, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t own Diablo III yet (and we need to start a charity for these people), let me explain.

Launch happened at 3:01 EST yesterday morning, so, as a huge fan of the first two games, I was obviously not going to be getting any sleep. I killed time up until that fateful hour and tried to log on. I got the seemingly innocuous Error 37 (which is the code you get when you can’t connect because of busy servers) and figured that of course the servers are busy what with people trying to log on and play D3 for the first time. So I tried again and received the same message, OK-keep trying. About an hour of constantly spamming my password led me to the title screen, yay! Now I can finally make my awesome themed set of characters, hopefully names like Bavmorda and FinRaziel aren’t taken yet! I clicked through to the character creation screen and the game hung, staring in disbelief for what seems like an eternity before a Request Timed Out message appears.

I took a break at this point to relax, since I was understandably upset. My name scheme (the reason I bought the digital copy when I did) was going to be up in smoke. I was lamenting awesome character names like Willow and Elora when I decided to try again. Another couple hours and some quick on-login fingerwork later I managed to create five characters with my preferred names. All of my characters, though, got their names on the first try, even Willow! Now, I knew that my Blizzard BattleTag would be non-unique and our exultant developer would make it so by cheaply tacking numbers on the end of the tag. I ended up with Nelwyn#1792, and that’s fine.. Whatever. What I didn’t realize before looking into it after the fact (and exactly how did this piece of information get by me?) was that even the character NAMES are non-unique. So basically, I suffered through the night for absolutely no reason at all. Silly Raven! I knew I wouldn’t be able to play the game tonight, though some people reportedly did get through to the actual game and played for a limited amount of time before being kicked out of the game due to the amount of people furiously spamming the servers, so I went to bed.

I wish the troubles had stopped there, but even all through the day, there were Error 37 issues, Request Timed Out reports, and times when I was being kicked out of the game every3-5 minutes. I couldn’t even listen to Deckard Cain speak about the Prophecy of End Days without being interrupted by error messages. My frustration with these issues was through the roof, so I most certainly waited a day before writing this piece to calm myself.

Now, there are two camps on these issues. The first is the fairly zen “Well what did you think would happen? This is Diablo III on launch day!” opinion, which I respect and admire. There aren’t many people who could wait a decade or more for a game and then casually brush off the issues they apparently were working on with a lengthy beta stage of development and even a free open weekend to test server loads and work out any issues before launch. Then there is the “Blizzard, stop sucking.” camp, which I am firmly entrenched in. I won’t go on a tangent here or anything.. But Blizzard, stop sucking. Honestly, I can’t imagine why this wasn’t forseen. It’s Diablo III on launch day!

At any rate, I do trust Blizzard to do what they can to fix it, and I’m sure there are very good reasons for all the trouble, though I still blame them. But what do I know? These are the same people who created the ubiquitous Starcraft and World of Warcraft franchises. They’ve got the experience and I’m willing to wait out the hell that is Diablo III on launch because this game is totally awesome.

To the dungeons!