3801

I was playing before all this stress test thing and with almost 300ms it wasn’t noticeable at all, except when i tried playing with other people.

3802

Just got in with no problem. Feels like Diablo to me.

I’ve just been playing through Torchlight again and I’m going to really miss my dog.

3803

Does the game seem choppy for anyone else? I am playing by myself, and my system is more than enough to handle it… i5 2500k and a gtx 560 ti with the latest drivers.

3804

Mine is running smooth as silk, and I have much lower specs than you (C2D + 9800 GTX). I seem to have really low ping to Blizzard’s server through U-Verse though, so maybe that’s it.

3805

I started a monk and killed the Skeleton King in one sitting, it feels like old times again. Except way prettier. Ran almost perfectly for me the whole time on my five-year-old computer, just one or two times where I had a second of rubberbanding.

3806

It’s usually choppy for the first 10 minutes or so for me, but completely smooth after that.

3807

I found the game much smoother with vsync enabled. The tearing without it (on default) can be quite bad at times. I did experience one instance of rubber-banding, which is bizarre in a single-player game, but I could live with it. How my folks who live in Cyprus are going to get along with it though, given that their internet is spottier than a leopard with measles, I’m not sure. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

3808

Can you see your ping time from within the game?

3809

Yes it’s in the skill bar on the right part.

3810

I think I notice framerate issues when certain environmental things are getting destroyed. It’s kind of strange but maybe there’s still something they have to nail down.

So far I’ve played through with two characters, and each playthrough had some slightly different encounters, neither of which I saw in the other playthrough. That’s pretty cool.

3811

Sigh. Its better than I thought and at least I got to play it before having to shell out cash for it. I still can’t get around the online only thing, logging in to play the single player game just grinds my gears. Heaven forfend I want to use “trainers” to goof around with my characters and custom item creation in the “open mode” or I want to play with friends from around the world via direct IP which was often more stable than bnet.

Random disconnects (yes yes, its a stress test) and checkpoints I think will lead to much frustration. Oops, my connection went on the fritz, 20minutes down the drain. Torchlight2 will be for those of us who dare to play games without a net connection.

Gameplay wise, I’m going to need convincing as to why there is a 30s cooldown to swap hotkey spells and you have to go into a seperate screen to do it. I’m not going to know if I’m in a aoe zone or single target boss type area until I’m there. Early demonhunter seems to deal with it fairly well though. After I got caltrops (slow trap) and the rune improved piercing arrow, the slow attack was no longer needed much. Then the stun rune for the throwing knife makes that a winner.

Oh, at least blizzard has finally fixed the realID idiocy by creating the “battletag” deal.

3812

First impressions soo far:

  • Pretty
  • The map is a linear path. boooooring.
  • The skill tree has not open much to me. I miss the giant tree in exile. Powergaming to me is theorycrafting build, and I can’t do that if I don’t know whats goin on.

UPDATE:
Second impression:

  • The maps open a bit more.
  • The way to maximize XP is counter-intuitive: you wait until a big group of mobs spawn, then kill then with a area of attack. So wen you sea a evil creature, dont kill it!, wait for more…
  • I like that there are changes areas in the map. Fun!.
  • The Demo/Beta make a bad case of why I have to buy the game.
  • I like all the things the game make with light, shadows, more lighting, and more shadows
  • No, we in europe don’t build gigantic underground buildings. We build big overground buildings and thats is, almost all underground building is small.
  • I have no idea why the character I am controlling (a wizard girl) is doing what is doing. She seems to want to pick the fallen star, but why? also the fallen star seems some sort of acid or magic radiactive or something. Not something you want to have in your hands. This girl is dumb.
3813

So, I created a character and I hit “Start Game”, and after a while it says “Your request timed out. Error 300008.” Am I doing something wrong? Surely their servers aren’t this busy at 6am? It must be something on my side. Peerblocker isn’t blocking any outgoing packets, so it’s not that. Do I need to look at router settings and firewalls and such maybe?

Sigh. This is a terrible way to play a single player game.

3814

After trying about 15 times, it finally worked, so I guess even at 6am Central time there must be a lot of people trying to play.

3815

Well I was hoping to give this a try this weekend, but so far I have yet to be able to log in, still getting Error 37.

3816

That’s Saturday morning in Europe when everyone is logging in. And given that the European and Asian servers were down a few hours ago, likely everyone in Europe was trying to log into the Americas server.

I can see this kind of thing happening a lot.

3817

This, so much this. I don’t have the greatest hardware and I was worried it might just be that and I would have to upgrade. With vsync on though, it improved a LOT.

There are no Euro or Asian servers for the beta, that’s why. All are connecting to the US servers.

3818

I know this is a beta, but this really does not bode well for release and a reason I can’t stand their decision to remove any kind of offline/LAN play. I expected a crush just as I’m certain that Blizzard did, but if they still can’t get their shit together the following day… well.

3819

I’m not defending their choice, but perhaps this is serving as a test for Blizzard, so they can get some ideas how they’re going to handle the release day crush. It’s easy to talk about handling high demand but it’s entirely different having to actually deal with it. So perhaps the issues this weekend will pave the way for a smooth launch day.

A guy can hope, can’t he?

3820

But Piracy…!!11!

I expect there to be some infrastructure face-melting occurring on the 15th. Will be neat to see how that goes but requiring always-on does indeed suck. All that means is that rather than hacking out the local DRM, there will need to be emulated auth servers. It doesn’t stop WoW emus and won’t stop even semi-intent scene people.