video Diablo III launch epic FAIL!

[briangw]

They have past experiences to go by. Blizzard is not new to this by any stretch. WoW and Starcraft II also put massive stresses on their systems upon launch. Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not stand up for what is right are merely pawns for those who do wrong. We could even expand this to software in general as there have been many substandard products thrust upon consumers and we have little to no legal recourse. It has to stop! Software companies need to be held responsible for their mistakes just as manufacturers of tangible goods are. Laws need to be changed to prevent them from hiding behind their EULAs and using them as blanket "its never our fault" policy. They must start taking responsibility for what they do/neglect to do.

I agree with your comment that it has to stop. But who's going to enforce that? The Blizzard and Diablo names are synonymous with quality. And unfortunately, this problem isn't going to change anything.

[briangw]

Money talks. You don't like the way Blizzard does things; don't buy their next release!

Easier said than done. Good luck trying to prevent the fanboys and girls from opening their wallets/purses.

[Ravensky]

"Diablo III Servers are full, would you like to enter the queue?" Really? O_o

[Michael Graham]

Battle.net servers went live at 12:01 PDT, which is 3:01AM my time. I have been in touch with a multitude of users who from the very first moment have encountered the dreaded "Error 37" explaining that the servers were busy. While I understand that there are probably hundreds of thousands of users trying to log on, this only shows a complete failure on Blizzard's behalf on several fronts:

1. Being one of the most anticipated game launches in years, Blizzard knew what to expect in load and should have planned accordingly, even if it required leasing additional servers for launch.

2. Blizzard insists on requiring all users to authenticate with their servers each time a user wants to play. Single Player anyone? Not if Blizzard has anything to do with it.

3. Blizzard caused massive unnecessary network traffic by not staggering launch times based on locale

4. Blizzard also caused massive unnecessary network traffic by forcing all game data to go through their servers.

5. Blizzard removed LAN play option that was present in Diablo 2 forcing users who want to play with friends to use Battle.net servers, yet again, causing massive unnecessary network traffic.

This is not the first time Blizzard has caused something to be totally fubar. Starcraft II launch was also plagued with these problems.

Message to Blizzard: Stop screwing your customer base!!! Listen to what they want and give it to them. You are in the entertainment industry and as such the customer truly is always right.

Yet I bet you're still gonna play. Less complaining please...

[Phantom Spaceman]

People need to vote with their wallets and stop whining on forums and twitter and Facebook IMO. I did not buy diablo 3, and will not purchase it at all period for a variety of reasons. Activision is the worst thing to happen to Blizzard as far as I can tell. I was talking to my best friend today about it, and we both agreed, until there's a significant boycott of these companies products, they'll keep doing this stupid stuff.

[rafter109]

Yet I bet you're still gonna play. Less complaining please...

These forums are here for open discussion. If you don't have anything useful add other than "stop complaining" go read another thread. No one made you read this.

[rafter109]

People need to vote with their wallets and stop whining on forums and twitter and Facebook IMO. I did not buy diablo 3, and will not purchase it at all period for a variety of reasons. Activision is the worst thing to happen to Blizzard as far as I can tell. I was talking to my best friend today about it, and we both agreed, until there's a significant boycott of these companies products, they'll keep doing this stupid stuff.

There will be no such thing as a significant boycott in this market. As long as there are teenage kids and parents with loose purse strings no amount of boycotting by the intelligent community will have any significant impact. Activision/Blizzard and EA have effectively formed a trust in the gaming market. Whenever a competitor comes around with an original idea, they buy them up and kill it off. The only thing that will stop this is voting out the lawmakers that are in the back pockets of these companies and enforcing Antitrust laws. Also would not hurt to set ground rules on how software companies must operate.

[rafter109]

Emergency server issues you say? Twice in 12 hours?! That's MADNESS! Unheard of! /s

Seriously, welcome to MMO's? I also hope you don't think that I'm defending Blizzard at all. I just have a firm belief of "lol @ early adopters" because I figure it's best to be a responsible consumer and wait to see how things pan out before I hurry off to throw my money at a company.

And my apologies if I'm coming off as a dick too. I'm just saying that all these problems with an online game are not a shocker, by any means. Yes, I get that it's a single player game. But you KNEW as a consumer (at least should have) what you were buying into, how things were going to run. (at least I really hope you did). Not much I can tell ya other than to tough it out. :ermm:

I always did. :p

Since when was the Diablo franchise ever classified as an MMO? RPG? Yes. MMO? Not at all. It has been treated as an MMO in the way that Blizzard has handled game sign in but there is not one sense of a "massively multiplayer" element.

[dead.cell]

Since when was the Diablo franchise ever classified as an MMO? RPG? Yes. MMO? Not at all. It has been treated as an MMO in the way that Blizzard has handled game sign in but there is not one sense of a "massively multiplayer" element.

I meant welcome to the world of MMO experiences, not that Diablo 3 is an MMO. He's claiming 2 emergency server shutdowns are a big thing, but considering D3 is online-only now, he's new to what is quite common in the MMO world and those who frequent them. It's only disappointing that people have to put up with this garbage just to play their game in what would be a single player solitude...

[Shadrack]

Bleh. This sucks my error 75. I'm going to watch TV.

[arrrgh]

I meant welcome to the world of MMO experiences, not that Diablo 3 is an MMO. He's claiming 2 emergency server shutdowns are a big thing, but considering D3 is online-only now, he's new to what is quite common in the MMO world and those who frequent them. It's only disappointing that people have to put up with this garbage just to play their game in what would be a single player solitude...

Well, it definitely sounds to me that you are coming with every excuse in the book to defend Blizz.. Again, D3 is not MMO and shouldn't be compared to them in anyway. Implementing singleplayer game to be fully online experience was Blizzard's decision and they should carry full responsibility over it.

Edit: And servers are down again..

[shakey]

Ya, this is getting really ****ing annoying blizzard.....

[Elliott]

I don't mind that they made it a fully online experience, but they should've had plenty of resources to handle the demand. They knew more or less how many people they had to accommodate, so it's pretty unacceptable to have these sorts of issues.

Then again, this is nothing new for a Blizzard game launch.

[Jase]

It's down again.

[Nimec]

I don't mind the issues as much as most people. What I do mind is the rollbacks that happen when the servers go down but you are still playing, not knowing that what you are doing isn't being saved to their servers so when you stop you get rolled back to the last moment when the server communicated with your client. This happened to us twice today. I wish we would just get outright disconnected instead of playing for 10-15 minutes not knowing that we are wasting our time.

[Kelxin]

Aren't you guys glad you gave blizzard your money now?? /giggle

[Prosidius]

Give it a few days and the servers will be stable. 5 years from now people wont remember the diablo 3 launch. They'll remember how great the game is.

[Kelxin]

I will definitely remember how good the server emulators work ... :D

[mattmatik]

People didn't expect Blizzard to spend all their WoW gold on servers, did they? They gotta eat, too!

[Slammers]

I understand people are abit miffed they are having troubles playing. But fact of the matter is, the people complaining on the forums are the minority.

The reason it seems like everyone is having trouble, is because the people that aren't having trouble are playing the game or doing something else, not wasting time sitting on a forum all day.

I have booked Friday off work. So have my friends. Why Friday? Because were aren't stupid. This is the most pre-ordered game in history. There has never been a launch of this magnitude, so it would be impossible to correctly predict what was going to happen.

I mean it's ok to be a little bit annoyed that you've missed like 2 days playing out of the rest of your life, but geez, it's almost scary how worked up people are getting.

ps: the argument that they shouldnt have to log in to play a single player game is completely stupid. diablo 3 is NOT a single player game. How is this so hard to understand?! Stop comparing and expecting it to be like the first 2. This is 2012, and many features in the game rely on being online. Why should Blizzard program two different games just to keep a tiny majority happy, when they are going to all be happy in a few days anyway. If you want a single player game, go play one, there are better singleplayer only action rpg's to be played IMO

edit: I would like to reference Half Life 2 for an example. It was/is probably THE most anticipated game launch of all time. It was also the first game to be activiated online through steam before you could play. Now, obviously, Valve had problems with the HL2 launch also. I could not play untill the next day as steam would not recognize my physical cd-key , many people had this problem. The internet went absolutely MENTAL! People bitching about how they shouldnt have to verify a singleplayer game online. People HATED steam in it's infancy. But does anyone talk about this now?

No, HL2 is regarded as one of gamings greats. Steam has set the industry standard for digital purchases and people mostly love it. Just saying...

[Beyond Godlike]

Largest launch in a long time. Blizz usually does a betterjob than most companys. Despite the issues, im loving the game.

[KiHu]

Largest launch in a long time. Blizz usually does a betterjob than most companys. Despite the issues, im loving the game.

If I dont remember everything wrong now, there was alot of issues both with WoW and SC2 launch.

SWTOR had a smooth launch, but game overall is lacking.

[HawkMan]

I understand people are abit miffed they are having troubles playing. But fact of the matter is, the people complaining on the forums are the minority.

The reason it seems like everyone is having trouble, is because the people that aren't having trouble are playing the game or doing something else, not wasting time sitting on a forum all day.

I have booked Friday off work. So have my friends. Why Friday? Because were aren't stupid. This is the most pre-ordered game in history. There has never been a launch of this magnitude, so it would be impossible to correctly predict what was going to happen.

I mean it's ok to be a little bit annoyed that you've missed like 2 days playing out of the rest of your life, but geez, it's almost scary how worked up people are getting.

ps: the argument that they shouldnt have to log in to play a single player game is completely stupid. diablo 3 is NOT a single player game. How is this so hard to understand?! Stop comparing and expecting it to be like the first 2. This is 2012, and many features in the game rely on being online. Why should Blizzard program two different games just to keep a tiny majority happy, when they are going to all be happy in a few days anyway. If you want a single player game, go play one, there are better singleplayer only action rpg's to be played IMO

edit: I would like to reference Half Life 2 for an example. It was/is probably THE most anticipated game launch of all time. It was also the first game to be activiated online through steam before you could play. Now, obviously, Valve had problems with the HL2 launch also. I could not play untill the next day as steam would not recognize my physical cd-key , many people had this problem. The internet went absolutely MENTAL! People bitching about how they shouldnt have to verify a singleplayer game online. People HATED steam in it's infancy. But does anyone talk about this now?

No, HL2 is regarded as one of gamings greats. Steam has set the industry standard for digital purchases and people mostly love it. Just saying...

No, I'm pretty sure when all the server in America is down, the people complaining on the forums are not the minority ...

[dead.cell]

Well, it definitely sounds to me that you are coming with every excuse in the book to defend Blizz.. Again, D3 is not MMO and shouldn't be compared to them in anyway. Implementing singleplayer game to be fully online experience was Blizzard's decision and they should carry full responsibility over it.

Edit: And servers are down again..

I know, jeez. My POINT is, once again, that since it requires you to BE online, you are subject to the same problems MMOs will face. Servers are servers, regardless of what's hosted on them. A great influx of traffic is going to cause problems, as if ensuring the software and hardware are running efficiently isn't enough. This isn't me defending Blizzard, these are just the basics.

Blizzard for whatever reason (piracy?) decided they wanted to pay more for servers, instead of cutting traffic flow in half by allowing offline play. With that decision, players will likely (from what I can tell already) suffer from the same things that everyone playing an MMO faces. Server crashes, lag / rubberbanding, rollbacks, maintenance, restarts, and what have you. You can tell me D3's not an MMO until your blue in the face, but these are the inevitable problems you are going to continue to see down the line, simply because you're playing online! Everyone saw this coming months ago when they announced it'd be online only. I'm not sure what you were expecting to be honest.

Once again, I'm not defending the company. I'm just applying some basic common sense and reasoning here. I'm not the one who went out and spent my money on a game expecting it to be perfect on day one though. I prefer to keep my cash (instead of throwing it a company first chance), wait to see how things pan out, and maybe wait for a sale unless it's something I really want. Diablo 3? No thanks. At least, not until I see PvP implemented.

[Dotdot]

Whinging about launch = epic fail.

Whinging about connection issues = epic fail.

Whinging your characters been deleted = epic fail.

Taking it on the chin, staying calm and breathe = epic win.