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Best Diablo 3 Announcement reaction gifs ever...
shmokes:
--- Quote from: kahlid74 on May 18, 2012, 11:39:05 am ---It's a fun game, I say as I depart my cave of game dwelling goodness. The difficulty doesn't scale they way they wanted it too and the people leveling have clearly shown that nothing short of 72 hours of straight game playing will stop them from defeating all difficulties as fast as possible.
The servers going down was annoying but alas, in our world obsessed with "I want it now" what would we expect people to do? I'm pleased. The game plays great. The items are great. The feel of Diablo is back and the story (what little of it exists) continues to be fleshed out.
I'm happy with my purchase.
--- End quote ---
There's so much self-contradiction there it's hard to know where to start. Nothing short of 72 hours of straight game playing will stop them . . . ? So 72 hours of straight game playing WILL stop them? I'm honestly not sure what your first paragraph means.
In our world of "I want it now" the thing we would expect is for Blizzard to anticipate server strain and provide appropriate capacity. Obviously. Jesus, it's not like they were hit with a DDoS. They were hit with EXACTLY what was expected. We're talking about the company behind BY FAR the biggest online videogame in history. It's not like they were caught with their pants down. There's no excuse.
And how do you in the same sentence describe the story as both "what little of it exists" and "fleshed out"? Those seem like almost opposite things. Don't get me wrong. A game doesn't need a strong, fleshed out narrative to be fun. But are you sure Diablo has a "fleshed out" story?
kahlid74:
--- Quote from: shmokes on May 18, 2012, 12:21:29 pm ---There's so much self-contradiction there it's hard to know where to start. Nothing short of 72 hours of straight game playing will stop them . . . ? So 72 hours of straight game playing WILL stop them? I'm honestly not sure what your first paragraph means.
--- End quote ---
The idea is that playing the game straight for 72 hours would cause them to need sleep/sustenance forcing them to stop. On the subreddit of Diablo the guys/gals who got to level 60/inferno in two days basically played 24/7. So it was more a figure of speech that nothing short of the limits of the human body would stop them from reaching the end game as fast as possible. No coding/additional difficulties by Blizzard would prevent them from reaching the end game.
--- Quote from: shmokes on May 18, 2012, 12:21:29 pm ---In our world of "I want it now" the thing we would expect is for Blizzard to anticipate server strain and provide appropriate capacity. Obviously. Jesus, it's not like they were hit with a DDoS. They were hit with EXACTLY what was expected. We're talking about the company behind BY FAR the biggest online videogame in history. It's not like they were caught with their pants down. There's no excuse.
--- End quote ---
I've got a bit of experience with data centers and traffic and I'll say this, traffic does not always behave the way you anticipate it to. There are also budgetary factors at play here and I've been down that road too. What is experienced on a launch day of a hot game posses similarities to a DDoS. I've been on the ground in data centers when events like this occur and it's a fun/terrifying experience.
--- Quote from: shmokes on May 18, 2012, 12:21:29 pm ---And how do you in the same sentence describe the story as both "what little of it exists" and "fleshed out"? Those seem like almost opposite things. Don't get me wrong. A game doesn't need a strong, fleshed out narrative to be fun. But are you sure Diablo has a "fleshed out" story?
--- End quote ---
I'll clarify. In a game, Diablo, where story was never been one of the strong points and where much of the history of said game has not been told, it's nice to see Diablo 3 trying to tell a lot of those back stories such as the story about the high heavens and the story about all of the lords of hell. I didn't say it was fleshed out, I said they continued too.
kahlid74:
--- Quote from: pinballjim on May 21, 2012, 09:48:04 am ---I played in Saturday on a friend's laptop. The zombie thing bores me to no end but I'm still twitching trying to resist going out and buying this thing.
--- End quote ---
It gets better once you get out of Act I. 2/3/4 are all jam packed with new monsters and you don't have to really worry about Zombies until you go back to Act I on NM/Hell/Inferno.
shmokes:
--- Quote from: kahlid74 on May 21, 2012, 09:43:27 am ---I've got a bit of experience with data centers and traffic and I'll say this, traffic does not always behave the way you anticipate it to. There are also budgetary factors at play here and I've been down that road too. What is experienced on a launch day of a hot game posses similarities to a DDoS. I've been on the ground in data centers when events like this occur and it's a fun/terrifying experience.
--- End quote ---
They had preorders and sales projections to gauge what the server demand would be during the launch week. Nobody preorders a game or buys it on launch day only to put it in a drawer and play it a month later. Especially a game with the feverish anticipation of something like the Diablo franchise. And there were no budgetary factors at play (or at least there should not have been). We're talking about a game that will make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit for Blizzard/Activision. Hundreds of millions. You build out the appropriate server capacity for a game like that. And to deliberately fail to do so because you know that after the launch-week server demand will be dramatically lower would be a terrible business decision. Look at all the bad will and negative press this has generated. You meet launch week demand and then repurpose excess server capacity later on. You don't leave millions of users unable to play their new game so you can squeeze out a few extra pennies of short-term profit. That's ---smurfing--- retarded.
Hoopz:
--- Quote from: shmokes on May 21, 2012, 11:39:19 am ---
--- Quote from: kahlid74 on May 21, 2012, 09:43:27 am ---I've got a bit of experience with data centers and traffic and I'll say this, traffic does not always behave the way you anticipate it to. There are also budgetary factors at play here and I've been down that road too. What is experienced on a launch day of a hot game posses similarities to a DDoS. I've been on the ground in data centers when events like this occur and it's a fun/terrifying experience.
--- End quote ---
They had preorders and sales projections to gauge what the server demand would be during the launch week. Nobody preorders a game or buys it on launch day only to put it in a drawer and play it a month later. Especially a game with the feverish anticipation of something like the Diablo franchise. And there were no budgetary factors at play (or at least there should not have been). We're talking about a game that will make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit for Blizzard/Activision. Hundreds of millions. You build out the appropriate server capacity for a game like that. And to deliberately fail to do so because you know that after the launch-week server demand will be dramatically lower would be a terrible business decision. Look at all the bad will and negative press this has generated. You meet launch week demand and then repurpose excess server capacity later on. You don't leave millions of users unable to play their new game so you can squeeze out a few extra pennies of short-term profit. That's ---smurfing--- retarded.
--- End quote ---
Stupid or not, it's what they did. And hence why a lot of people won't buy single player games that require constant internet access. People can argue the semantics of it being single player or not, but a lot of people won't drop $60 for a game that you can't play unless the server is functional at the time that they want to play. Probably not enough people to make a difference for Blizzard to change anything though.