The interesting, forgotten aspect of this I think. Launch difficulties were inevitable because it’s lots of people trying to play the same thing online. It is beyond the likes of me to fully categorize the current launch difficulties at this time (3 hours seems like a lot is about all I can say. Also: I’ll owe you a coke if everything is back up by 4:30est. I won’t be home from work yet to find out). There were plenty of people who figured the lack of offline single player was much ado about nothing.
And certainly, in a month and maybe a week it’s likely to be far less of an issue. But it’s an issue right now. And this is to say nothing of how future patch Tuesdays (c.f.) are going to go, even if they’re far less frequent.
They were fully aware, they just chose not to spend the money for extra capacity for the initial rush when that capacity would precipitously drop two weeks later.
And to the people saying they should just go to AWS for burst capacity, it’s not that easy. You need to design your application to do that early on.
I was just surprised at how doublespeaky that description of the game was, as if always-on somehow fundamentally changes the game design. Single-player is never the subordinate method of play when you’re talking about a computer game that has enemy AI.
Pogo
4944
Nope, you’re not getting away with that one, dipshit. Here’s what you actually posted:
Thanks for the sweet, delicious hypocrisy.
Peace, I was just having some fun with our old friend bplotkin/kahless/IHateMorrowind/ExecutionerFive/WhitePride/Darkstar One/Defcon One…
I’m jealous. I still can’t get in.
aeneas
4948
Blizz are teasing me with the green authenticated tick
Really? How does that square with MMOs then? They’re clearly multiplayer games that are packed with enemy AIs.
I guess I’m just inured to all this angst from years of MMO play…it really will get better and probably pretty quickly.
Razgon
4950
Sure - That shouldn’t stop us from showing our annoyance at the issues that could easily have been avoided by choosing a different model, though.
Otherwise you would have been British today ;-)
DeepT
4951
My vacation starts tomorrow. I hope they got things ironed out, or at least to the point of “Mostly UP with the occasional, short down time.”
Blizzard knew this would happen, I’m sure, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. People gripe for a week and then spend the next year gorging on Diablo. Nobody cares.
It’s like snow removal equipment here in Raleigh. The city knows it snows at least once each winter. Every time it does, the city is basically shut down for a day but they never invest in snow removal equipment. Why spend the money for one day a year?
Gendal
4953
Right, I am just disappointed they didn’t do so. Blizzard’s culture is so steeped in quality and polish I figured they would have come up with a solution other than to throw your hands up in the air and admit defeat. It’s not like this was an unexpected problem.
To be fair though I guess we are not necessarily having a capacity problem right now, the servers are just down for maintenance.
Which brings up another issue, Blizzard needs to work on their patch/hotfix rollout timing. It’s sloooooow, especially compared to the slick methods Facebook, Twitter, etc employ now.
Fozzle
4955
Who still takes time off work on the first day of an online game release? How man of these do we need to go through before you realize you don’t take time off until Thursday…
This of course doesn’t apply to those “up at 3 AM waiting in line to play types…”
Diablo 1 was a technologically advanced, gorgeous game for its time. I remember that my 486-66 couldn’t run it. I needed a faster CD drive and a little more RAM.
Diablo 2 came out and people (including me) were upset by the low resolution, people (including me) couldn’t understand the odd save game system, and for weeks and months there was much gnashing of teeth. Go check google’s usenet archives if you doubt.
The point is this: Blizzard’s gonna do what Blizzard’s gonna do. Their games and their game design decisions seem to stand the test of time, even if they sometimes frustrate our expectations initially.
D3 is a gorgeous modern looking game. Admittedly, videogame graphics have been stunted for almost a decade now due to consoles, but still. It looks better for 2012 than D2 did for 2000.
Como? It squares fine – I played my 50 levels of WoW solo. PvE MMOs don’t need people to play with. They are lousy single-player designs that rely on their social elements and some addictive mechanics to make them popular.
Since there isn’t a PvP mode in D3 yet, you can’t make the case that this is a multiplayer game.
Wow always seems to work the first day. And it’s my week of day shift. I hate day shift.
MMOs have a persistent shared world. Diablo doesn’t, it creates a new randomly generated world instance for each player.
