Is single player still affected by latency? Aside from DRM, I'm hoping that the always connected part is just to continuously save your character and to work out drops from mobs, neither of which are particularly latency dependent.

Yep, it is.

This video seems to claim single player isn't affected by latency

I played the closed Beta for D2 (back when half the people who will play D3 hadn't even hit puberty yet. :Pirate:), and it was absoutely nothing like the full game on release. Hoping (expecting) the same for D3.

Given the lag i've experienced playing it single player i'm going with "they're full of shit". That said at about 250ms it's reasonable. It definitely happens though.

Hopefully the stress test on the weekend has given them enough data that they'll have enough servers online for launch and any lag is minimal.

The last few rounds of patches I have found next to no lag (unless I have other applications killing the network)

Strange, cause the only time I ever had latency issues was when I would open the map or inventory screen, I'd close it, try to start moving away and my character would stutter.

Thanks for that.

These analogies are the worst I have ever seen.

From my own experience. I connected to the game in 4 different ocasions to try and test the latency issues.

Location: Brisbane
Connection: ADSL2+ (Dodo)

Test 1 - Saturday noon
Using proxy server to US (Los Angeles) got a latency of ~200ms. The game played flawlessly, no noticeable lag.

Test 2 - Saturday night
No proxy. Getting a latency of ~250ms spiking up to 700ms. Lag definitely noticeable when latency was spiking, getting yellow and red bars.

Test 3 - Sunday night
Using proxy server to US (Dallas) got a latency of ~220ms. No problem.

Test 4 - Monday night
No proxy. Getting latency of ~220. No problem

From my own experience I can say that there is no real issues with the latency as the use of proxy or no proxy didn't do much. With a latency of ~200ms the game is perfectly fine.

My explaination of why did I have such problems in Test 2 is because it was Saturday night here in Oz which meant that it was Saturday morning the US and everyone waking up to play D3 after leaving the PC downloading during Friday night.

The video is presenting the fact there is ZERO latency in single player, regardless of what the green bar says.

So i booked in a week holiday from 15th May mostly to play this game as I am sure many other have too, problem is I bet the first week the servers will be overrun and wont be able to login/play. Any else have doubts about being able to play that week ?

Regarding latency I found that most of the time I had a latency of ~250ms which did not impact the gameplay.
There were periods of time over the weekend however where I experienced ~500ms which introduced serious lag into the gameplay.
I am assuming this is something of a stress test weekend so that when they go live they will have sufficient servers/backend to reduce any lag on their end.
I am still not fond of singleplayer gameplay being susceptible to lag but the game has me interested enough that I may overlook it and purchase.

Might have issues on the day of the launch for a few hours, but the entire week? Unlikely imo. Blizzard usually on the ball. The open beta weekend was to stress test those auth and game servers, which from what I understand went pretty well. It's not like WoW though with huge wait times on individual servers, as it's regions with huge clusters, not servers (even though I'm sure the WoW ones were clustered anyway).