2901

The appeal of D2 for me was playing with friends. I never finished D2 single player. I always played multi-player. In the original Diablo I never played the single player either. Most of the fun for me in these games is hanging out with friends in Vent while we fight monsters together.

2902

I think my battle.net name is Jab if anyone wants to do co-op. I’m going to get be getting as much as I can out of the beta and going through with each class :)

2903

Shouldn’t there be a number after “Jab” for your ID?

2904

Anyone able to log in? I get a time out error.

2905

According to the account page my battle tag for D3 after Jab is #1340 if that means anything. But then it shows a different # for my starcraft handle.

2906

I was getting that a few minutes ago and it’s working now.

I also have an achievement bug. For the co-op elite kills 20 achievement. It says that I have 20/20 but the achievement is greyed out.

2907

I was able to get in and finished the beta with a wizard. Tried to start another round with a witch doctor and now I just get 300008 timeout errors.

Going to assume the rush of 100k new beta invites is killing their servers.

Which is one of my main concerns with Diablo 3. It’s 100% online now. If your internet is down, Blizzard is swamped, you’re traveling with a laptop and no wifi… you’re screwed. Most of us are going into that situation with eyes wide open, but I’m hoping they are going to have it say prominently on the box that “internet connection required to play”

2908

Agreed, Diablo the franchise to me is my first memory on a dial up in Diablo. It was a amazing to me, I met a group of people from Australia, and we were friggin playing the game together. Not a very good game, till we messed around for an hour to find who could host the best game.

Fast forward a few years, we were still friends and playing Ultima and Everquest together. Fast forward again, we have kept in touch but no longer have time for guild drama, raid schedules and such, but we keep in touch and have been waiting for something like D3 again. The last game we played together was Hellgate London, a failure of a game, but fun and fast for folks who only have a couple hours at a time a couple days a week.

2909

I played the Barb last night. I liked the rage builder talents, but so far all of the rage spender and utility powers seem rather “meh”. I think the starting hammer of the ancients is test best rage spender I have gotten so far.

While this was only my 2nd time through the game, it seemed to me that the maps are identical except for which instanced door something is behind. IE: Locate the crypt under the swamp, which crypt is being the right one is random. I also once again found the monster spawner challenge in the third crypt I went it, in the same room with the same adjoining rooms. I hope there is more variability in the final D3 release. Titian quest was great, but one major drawback was that it was the same every time you played it.

2910

The thing about TQ was while the levels were the same layout, it didn’t matter. The creature spawns and item drops being randome was much more important and TQ did that … okay. Some areas always had the same mobs, though.

DIII using higher quality backdrops for the overland is fine with me, seeing it work in TQ so much (I initially thought I’d hate it) but the DIII stuff looks so much better than the random open flat planes of DII, honestly.

Plus, the layout of the dungeons and internal areas is random, and based on “chunks”. I liken it to something like Space Hulk or other board games which comes with modular pieces, basically. The events that can spawn are very cool, though I haven’t seen a lot of variety yet, it’s only the first two hours of the game, and I doubt we have all that stuff accessable in the beta (I hope we don’t, I’d like some surprises at launch).

Oh, as to the Barbarian, I like the rage generators too, especially Cleave, but I was enjoying Frenzy and Ignore Pain for my spenders, I thought they worked pretty well.

2911

Torchlight would be a good comparison of random modules regarding level design.

2912

I also kind of meant, that the dungeons I was in, seemed to be laid out the same way as the first play-through. Ill play the rest of the classes this weekend and get a better feel for it. Maybe it was a bit different, but just seemed to be the same.

Oh there is another thing I do like. It seems that item durability loss is broken or disabled. I would be quite happy if they dropped that aspect of the game altogether.

2913

The best thing about Diablo III is how if I play single-player while I have stuff using all my bandwidth in the background it’s all hitchy and jumpy and basically feels like a big pile of shit.

2914

Welcome to “software as service.”

2915

Really? That sucks, I was hoping it was just using it for initial authorization. I have a rural broadband connection, it is easily filled by someone watching Netflix in the house or the like.

2916

I don’t think that’s a connection thing. It’s like that for me sometimes while I’m playing, no matter how much my connection’s being used for other things. I think it’s just an “it’s a beta” thing.

2917

Nope. It’s not just initial activation. It’s always connected or bust.

2918

Huh, if that is true then I am much less annoyed, because presumably it has a hope of being fixed.

2919

Diablo 2 had unplayable lag for a month after launch even when creating private single player games. This is only beta and it’s running pretty smooth for me with only a few hitches. Whether that will change when they let everyone in remains to be seen.

2920

Although, it’s probably a good preview of what launch week will be like. Expect mega-congestion.