Diablo 3's Launch Is A Flop

People have waited for it for 12 years. Fans have anticipated it, prayed for it, performed heathen rituals to appease the gods and speed the delivery of Diablo 3 onto gaming shelves and online stores everywhere.

Yet, the hype of Diablo 3’s launch has been marred by countless bugs, issues and errors preventing people from enjoying the product they just coughed up 64$ for. What are these problems with Diablo 3?

Three User Agreement screens later(to sum it up: we can do what whatever we want, and nothing you do or say will give you the right to sue us - seriously, their EULA states they are not liable for damages or performance issues due to “acts of god”? How do you define that, legally? It goes without saying that a cunning enough argument can explain any occurrence as an act of god, and stating otherwise can cause a legal and religious shitstorm), you can still play the game, right? Nope.

First of all, you have to log in online to play a single player game. Alone.

You find yourself staring at the log in screen, familiar from other games such as World of Warcraft or The Old Republic, but a bit of a cockblock when it comes to a single player game. If you want to play it like you play Skyrim - alone, in your basement, fighting scores of enemies by yourself - you can’t. You still need an active internet connection and a battle.net acount. If your internet goes down, you can’t play it. If you have a blackout and one hour of battery left on your laptop, you can’t play it. The multiplayer component of Diablo 3 is elective : you can do it, but you don’t have to, and you can still play it alone, just as millions of gamers already prefer to.

Then there’s the myriad of bugs that prevent you from actually playing the game.

You get disconnected for no reason, even if you’re playing a single player game. If you get disconnected, you may encounter an error asking you to ensure that no party members are in game before you try to reconnect - on a single player game with no option to go offline.

Then there’s the Battle.net outages. Their service just crashes due to the number of disconnects and people attempting to reconnect. Sure, this can be expected on the launch of any big game or expansion. I was there when Wrath and Cataclysm were launched, I was there when The Old Republic came out, but in those games you weren’t greeted with errors and server boots - you were placed in a queue where you had to wait like a docile little man-sheep for 30-120 minutes. But hey - at least you could log in. I understand the financial reasons for not spending money on hardware and staff for the first week or so of launch, because when the player base settles down you’ll need less anyway. It’s just a matter of grinding your teeth and crawling your way through that initial week - and this goes for both user and provider.

But I don’t think it’s right to pay 60$ on a product that you can’t use in the first couple of days, and I don’t think it’s healthy PR to undermine your player base by giving them a crappy service instead of finding a way to secure a quality product from day one.

So you can have serious issues playing the game because of bugs on Blizzard’s end. But you can still have plenty of issues because of what’s going on with other user’s products. Diablo 3’s launch crashed the Battle.net service and prevented players of their other online games (World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2). So, assuming you’re not even into Diablo 3, or interested in playing it, and you’re playing a completely different Blizzard game, you can still be at the receiving end of an ass-fuck of a problem - all because somebody else’s overpowering desire to play Diablo 3.

When people eventually managed to log into the game,one of the things many players found unnerving was that any past or current battle.net friend (let’s say, a World of Warcraft pal you haven’t played with in years or a StarCraft 2 player you used to do 2v2’s with) can immediately see you when you’re online in Diablo 3, and pop in on your game session uninvited, without the game asking you for your permission.

All this could have been avoided in the first place if the single player component was not hosted online, and you didn’t have to log in to their servers and deal with queues, crashes, erros and other issues - that have affected players of other products as well. Perhaps it would have been easier to simply go online for the multiplayer option, but hosting the whole thing online has brought a ton of issues, errors, limitations on character naming etc. I think it’s personally disappointing to be unable to enjoy a product you pay 64$ for, the moment you install it. Why is it that this sort of event happens all the time with online games? Rarely has Blizzard refunded play time for WoW players when servers were down for extended periods due to faults or errors on their end. I doubt players will receive any compensation for being unable to play Diablo 3 from the moment of purchase. If this was any other kind of product, it wouldn’t even be a debate: buy a broken iPod, buy a broken dishwasher, you can return it and get your money back, or have it replaced. However, it seems that with many games you lose control and ownership over the product you just paid for.

The decision to enjoy a product or service, once paid for, should be the customer’s - not the provider’s.

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