Diablo III Launch = Technical Disaster?
Posted 16 May 2012 by FluxThough I personally didn’t have too much trouble playing when the servers first went up yesterday, if you go by the gaming media’s coverage of Diablo III’s launch, it was a complete disaster. Dozens of articles on every sort of gaming and tech site stress the technical problems, the inability to log in or create characters, the disconnects, and the server outages.
Seriously, look at Google News for “Diablo 3 launch” and easily two-thirds of the articles make it sound like some sort of Titanic Hindenburg crashed into a sky iceberg. Some quotes and links to give you a sense of the amount of angry headlines:
From this I have to think the general fan’s opinion of D3′s launch is that it was a disaster. Was that how things went for you guys? As bad as these media stories make it sound?
For me, Diablo III’s launch wasn’t bad. Thanks to delays from ending our live launch show and getting my computer set up to livestream the playthrough, I wasn’t able to log onto the EU server until about an hour after it went live. When I finally did, it took a few minutes of trying, but I was able to get in, create a Wizard, and create a game fairly easily. It took Elly a good fifteen minutes to get logged on as well, but once she was in we played together in the same game for a good five hours straight. The game was actually more stable than our computers, as I had two hard crashes and she had one, while the same game remained online the entire time.
I didn’t try to log onto the US servers at midnight, but the players I’ve talked to said logging in was impossible for half an hour or so, but after that things went pretty well. The Asian servers were online hours earlier and weren’t great, but mostly held up, from reports I’ve read.
So why is the online news coverage so negative? Did a lot of journos try at 12:05, get realm unavailable messages, and /ragequit?
Remember last year after the online-only “feature” was announced and got a lot of bad press, yet most of you guys were supportive of it and insisted (as did Blizzard) that everyone had a good internet connection by now, that Blizzard knew how to run game servers with at least 24/7 (or at least 23.8/7) uptime, that people who wanted single player mode were just pissed about losing out on piracy, etc. Anyone rethinking their opinion on that issue yet, or are you perfectly willing to suffer through a day or a week (or a month?) of repeated server inaccessibility for what you see as a greater good?
I did not try to login for the midnight launch. I did pre-install my digital copy on Monday evening when this was possible.
Tuesday morning I woke up at 6:00 went to work and was home at 17:00. I read on the forums the article from Flux and Elly playing together and was really looking forward to playing some after the years of waiting. At 19:30 finished reading my son his bedtime story and switched on the PC to finally play this game a bit. After several different error codes I was able to reach the character creation screen and made a new character to start.
I could not start nor join any game and got another error code. I than read on the forum that there was an emergenc patch and ETA for servers to be back up was 1 hour. I continued trying to log on every 10 minutes or so. Then read another message on the forum that the servers are estimated to be down for another 2,5 hours.
So how do I feel? Frustrated! I waited a long time for this game, I tried loggin in for the first time almost 20 hours after launch, and even though I spent 2 hours on trying to log in, the furthest I got to playing was a character login screen. Even the open beta was better than this, as there at least I could play at times. It is very disappointing so far that the open beta offered a better expereince to me than the final game. I hope I am able to play a bit tonight. I have a busy job, family and friends and usually have 2 evenings on which I play games for a few hours, not being able to play when I have time is therefore very frustrating and poor customer service.
Not sure about other regions but the server for the Americas has been awful and exactly as bad as those articles state. When midnight hit, I was unable to login until close to 2AM and this was with repeated effort. A couple times I got to the character creation screen tried over and over and failed at that point too. Then this afternoon they take it down for a couple of hours for emergency maintenance and things seem okay. Well the evening hits and they have to take it down for 3-4 more hours for more maintenance. The game itself is mindblowing, but the launch was indeed an EPIC fail.
You can’t prepare for the unexpeted but were those problems really unexpected ? All this time with the game it and we got this on launch day. Hopefully they will actually fix stuff soon.
My experience was very frustrating as well: I coudn’t connect to EU servers at midnight (that was kinda expected), at 1 AM (the frustration began) and in the end I logged in at 2 AM. I played a couple of hour and went to bed.
Yesterday was a complete disaster: I wasn’t able to play from 6 PM to 11 PM, and many others with me. The italian official forum was flooded with insults and threads about the server fail and only one blue answered with “the servers are doing fine!”… today they removed all the spam/insults/trolling messages from the official forum, but it still was a complete disaster.
Since I logged on at 21.58 pm in Eu without ANY problem and tested it several times after it, you are already not telling the truth about that timing.
You see, there is no need to complain: when the log in is on overflow do some exercices and walk around on planet earth. Go with the flow.
The fact that you were able to log in (while thousands of others couldn’t) doesn’t make my words fake. Trust me, I have no interest in bashing the game for no reason. The technical support in Italy was also “extremely lacking” and unprepared, to say the least.
It’s fair if you can’t play at midnight (as THEY announced, btw) but when you can’t connect FOR HOURS the day after release, even for a single player session, well… that isn’t very ok.
PS: don’t worry about my exercises: I’m pretty sure that I’m fitter and healthier than you!
There is thread “Login and ‘Error 37′” on Bnet D3 forum about technical issue in EU so far it’s 814 pages and counting..
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4064636470
So yeah i suppose EU got “some” issues
So … How much time does 4.000.000 rats take to enter a 2 inch hole?
So Blizzard needed to have a bigger hole ?
The problem is that our present day hardware (wall) doesn’t allow it.
You ARE STUCK with that hole.
So how come other launches didn’t have it ? They had lots of holes (realm servers) and far less rats …
See that wasn’t too difficult to explain for tech noobs …
Now you know how ridiculous these rats are when they can’t enter said hole … In 5 seconds.
Yep, human civilisation is but a thin layer…
I was having just as many problems as the next person, but I was expecting them for the first day or so. I realized that it would quickly be fixed and most likely will not plague the game for the rest of its life. Well, until the first expansion that is.
I really had no major issues, installed, logged on around 8:30PM EST last night, got in about 1.5 hours, logged off, then went back on around 11PM, then got the error 37, followed by 3003 and 75, then note came up stating realm down. With these types of launches, with the shear number of gamers playing, everyone should expect some downtime. The beta helped with some kinks, but a limited beta does not even come close to equaling the first day of release( which is why I chose to work for first few days, rather than take time off). People who get upset need to chill out, and just remember that once the initial influx of new gamers playing this goes down, that Blizzard will be able to adjust the servers, add more if needed and make things more smooth. Console games have ruined expectations for game releases as they usually require no down time, with D3, everyone knew it was online only, so should have expected some issues… with that said, Hope everyone is able to get on and play soon, game is great so far…. and I’m only at lvl 8 with my wizard…
^^ douche that believed server uptime/stability would be excellent because of blizzard’s experience with SC2 and WoW.
Whoops, my bad!
Only now in EU icould somewhat login and actually play, at midnight and second day it was almost impossible before the patch they released so yeah the media are saying the truth.. its a disaster launch for sure for this kind of important game for blizzard.
LMFAO like I said a little while back, launch day will be a replica of open beta!! boy am I glad I’m waiting for my CE to arrive from overseas, instead of wasting 80 bucks on a crappy digital copy that I wouldn’t be able to play for days, until Blizzard pulled their thumbs outta their useless asses and did something right for a change.
just wait, only days away from creating my very first char….and then Bashiok will get a real load of me.