3981

That gave me a good laugh.

I feel quite nerdy, I have never actually done this before with a game, but I took 3 days study leave from work following the release. Finally doing a PhD part-time is starting to pay off.

3982

Lucky for me my birthday is the 16th, so I was taking that day off anyway. Having the day off to play Diablo III is just icing on the cake (well, the virtual cake… there’s likely to be an actual cake too!).

3983

I’m so jealous of the people in the beta now. After getting a taste of it that open weekend, I really wanted to try out some other class besides the Demon Hunter.

I wonder what the time limit will be for characters to get erased if you stop playing them for a while? Any characters I ever started in Diablo 2’s online service all got deleted by the time I ever decided to come back to them. But of course, in Diablo 2 I still had all my LAN/single player characters, which is how I mostly played the game. You’d think since they’re getting rid of those characters, they’d be more forgiving with their time limit this time around.

3984

Well, you needn’t be jealous long since the beta ends tomorrow… :)

3985

Given you are forced to store even SP characters online, it would be beyond fucked up if they deleted them at any time. I doubt it will happen.

3986

It’s been officially stated characters will NEVER be deleted. Even Diablo 2 characters are not deleted any longer, that concept is a very old relic from a long ago age, thankfully.

3987

Have to say that I ended up being impressed with what I managed to play of the beta, and surprised that I had the most fun with the Witch Doctor.

My only concern is the few times that I was running down some ruined hall and my character/party would suddenly reset to being where they were a second or two before. This only happened once in battle (with the Skeleton King) but if it happens at a critical point it could cause some major trouble. Is this a sync issue and it was “fixing” it? I was playing solo, so no one else could comment on whether it was happening to them at the same time.

3988

It was lag, if that’s what you mean by a sync issue.

3989

Ah, I usually think of lag as being when I want to do something but it takes a bit before it happens. This was my character actually having been shown doing what it was supposed to and then the game would pull back to an earlier point. Regardless, if lag becomes the death of me, I’ll be pissed considering it’s a single player game for me.

3990

That’s “rubberbanding,” when the client receives your commands and executes them before the server tells the client where it’s supposed to be.

I only ever got that issue when attempting to move immediately after closing the Main Menu, actually. At other points I did get lag when my shitty internet hit 330ms or worse, but never really rubberbanding.

3991

Isn’t rubberbanding a symptom of lag? It’s caused by poor latency, anyway. I had it a few times as well.

3992

I think it’s more subtle than that, perhaps having to do more with how packets are lost (which is a contributor to lag), than just having lag due to a slow connection.

I’m talking out of my ass but I feel like there’s a difference.

3993

Moral of the story: fuck always online.

And scene.

3994

Yeah, Fuck Always Online! I mean, who wanted to play Diablo III anyway, amirite?

3995

All the people that Beyonce wrote that “All the Single Players” song for, I think!

3996

I see what you did there.

I actually don’t disagree that the “always online” thing is terribly retarded. It’s absolutely ridiculous that there can’t be an offline mode that has zero access to the auction house and no way whatsoever to intereact with the online characters stored on the server side, anyone who agrees otherwise would be a fool.

I just don’t think it’s worth bringing it up twice per page anymore.

3997

After only 133 pages (by my count)? :)

3998

Then stop responding when it is brought up :)

3999

Shoot seriously? I had just convinced myself to try and get all the beta achievements.

4000

As a corollary, lag makes playing hardcore riskier. I’ve been lag-killed before, and I remember thinking “thank goodness I’m not playing ironman”.