You must have played on a low population server.

Barthilas has shocking queues for a month or two after each expansion

Diablo 3 uses regional central servers like SC2, and uses the same authentication servers. The lower number of servers and heavy client side content drastically reduces the issues surrounding maintenance and uptime.

WoW has a very large number of servers in a complicated persistent world with constant communication between them from instances. It's a completely different ecosystem, it only really uses battle.net for authentication. Diablo 3 is nowhere near as complicated from a server standpoint as WoW.

Jubei'Thos

I don't mind them having the 'always-on' DRM for the MP portion of the game. It's a given that internet connection will be required for MP since they've removed LAN.

Of course most people these days have stable connections, but to have your internet randomly drop out while in the middle of a boss fight and then get booted from your singleplayer game... is a bit disappointing to say the least. It's not something that will happen to everyone all the time, but I can see it being a pretty big annoyance when you do get dc'd.

They should've just had two different sets of characters; one for offline play only, and one for battlenet/MP play. But no, they won't do that because it would allow people to pirate the game. The decision, regardless of what Blizzard says, is just a piece of shit DRM (much the same as Ubisoft's failed 'always connected' DRM) which ultimately negatively impacts legitimate players.

But that's not the only problem... server maintenance will be an issue. Get ready to see lots of messages like this:

And that's just rolling restarts.

No doubt Blizzard will be happy to charge a monthly fee for battle.net server maintenance too.


Oh yeah, this is Blizzard's response to all of this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Dia...ker,13187.html

Rubbish, just inform the player that the SP characters cannot be used in online play and the people who do not care about getting dc'd from the game when their internet dies or the server goes down, well they can just make a multiplayer character.

That's absolutely hilarious.

The same is if you play an offline game by yourself.


But, whatever. As I said earlier, I will still buy this game simply because I have never played a game with the 'always on' DRM. I'm happy to be proven wrong, and that the 'always on' is a viable DRM method, because I have been waiting for this game for 10 years.

Has anyone tried this on a surround setup??

Sigh... Seems like everything I am looking forward to is not surround... SC2 was a big one and now it seems D3, wouldn't mind someone trying to see if the resolutions are available.. redesigning the UI is not that much of a big deal, look at WOW, Haters are gonna hate saying oh well i don't run surround so i don't care, but people that do want at least an option its the way to go tbh, once you go surround you never go back.. at least i haven't heard of anyone going back to a single display after setting up surround i know i won't.

By surround do you mean multi-monitor? I don't see how diablo would work well for multimonitor. It's not really the game that attributes itself to that kind of setup. If anything, i'd rather be playing off a higher quality projector, single screen, than playing with 3x 27" monitors with annoying as hell bezels in the middle.

Also, have you considered that the people that play multimonitor (fps, racing not so much) may be just be the kind of person that feels some kind of significant benefit from multimonitors and thus they are naturally inclined to not go back to playing on 1 screen, not because it is genuinely better. Cause and Causality.

Sorry but you can't claim the Monk is overpowered when A. you haven't played it. B. It has only been played in the EASIEST section of the game. and C. It has only been played to level 12.

A Barb in beta got to 325DPS and kills the Skeleton King in ~2 seconds. I don't see people claiming the barb is OP.

Save the judgement for release.

For the record i'm a huge monk fan

Running 3x 23" in portrait, I enjoy the extra large resolution I have. Games like Titan Quest supports it and you do get the benefit of being able to see further away than everyone else, since the image they're seeing are restricted by resolution.

Yeah mutli monitor set ups are pretty useless for a vast number of games. They shine when it comes to flight/driving simulators and can be useful in some FPS but definitely not suited for a game like D3. I mean what are you going to have on the other screens? More environment or blackness for out of level areas? It is going to add nothing and be of no help. A number of games actually limit use as seeing more of the playing field would give that player an unfair advantage in multiplayer games.

I have heard people say that.

quick question is the d3 beta atm all act 1 or only part

Only reason why Blizzard held back proper large resolution support for SC2 and D3. As in you can have your resolution as high as you want, but you'll still only see as much as the next person. And in a single player mode, it actually is extremely useful to have the screen show more. I'd love to be able to see where my scouts are rather than having to scroll all over the place or change screen to find them.

I can see this being a little more confusing in D3 because they seem to be pushing towards accountwide progression in many aspects of the game.

In D2 each character was basically an isolated instance of the game, so having an "open" character and a "battle net" character was pretty straightforward. I still think it's pretty poor that they don't offer offline singleplay, but I think implementing in a way that didn't lead to confusion/frustration would be much more difficult than D2 because of the design choices they've made (like artisan upgrades being shared across all characters on your account, shared account stash etc.)

or frostmane/shadowsong

never a queue, not.even.once.