So it's been two days since Diablo III came out and I'm still a little mad about it, so you get a blog post.
Quick recap for anyone who's been ignoring the internet: Blizzard's Diablo III launched at midnight on May 15th, and by their own numbers it sold something like 3.5 million copies in the first 24 hours, which apparently makes it the fastest-selling PC game ever. That part's impressive and I don't want to take anything away from it. Twelve years since Diablo II and people still lined up at midnight releases like it's 2004. I kind of love that, honestly.
What I don't love is that I bought the collector's edition, installed it, sat down around 12:20am ready to go, and got greeted by Error 37 for most of an hour. "The servers are busy at this time thus preventing you from logging in." Over and over. I refreshed the launcher like it was a Ticketmaster queue for a Radiohead reunion tour.
Here's the thing that actually bugs me, and its not the queue itself — launch day traffic spikes happen, whatever, I get it, Blizzard has had this problem before with WoW expansions. What bugs me is why I needed a server connection at all. Diablo III is, as far as I can tell, mostly a single-player game for most of the people playing it. I wanted to click on skeletons by myself in my pajamas at half past midnight. Instead I needed Blizzard's authentication servers in California to be healthy before the game would even let me see my own character.
This is the always-online thing people have been arguing about for months, ever since Blizzard confirmed there'd be no offline mode at all, not even a LAN option like Diablo II had back in 2000. I remember running Diablo II over a hub cable with my cousin with zero internet involved whatsoever. That option is just gone now. The official line is that its about stopping item duping and third-party gold farming, and sure, that was a real problem in Diablo II's economy for years. But it feels like punishing the 95% of players who never touched the auction house to stop the 5% who'd have found a workaround anyway.
And to be fair to Blizzard, once the servers settled down (for me it was around 2am, some people were locked out way longer, I saw threads of people still fighting Error 37 the next afternoon) the actual game is really good. Loot feels great, the art direction on the Cathedral levels is fantastic, and the Witch Doctor is exactly the kind of pet-summoning chaos-caster I always end up gravitating toward in these games. I'm not mad at the game. I'm mad at the box it's shipped in.
There's also a real-money auction house coming later this year where you'll apparently be able to buy and sell items for actual cash, which is its own whole conversation I don't have the energy for tonight. Ask me again once it's live and I've watched someone list a weapon for forty bucks.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: this is also, coincidentally, a pretty wild week for anything with "server capacity" in the headline. Facebook priced their IPO shares at $38 this evening ahead of trading tomorrow, and I keep picturing some poor infrastructure team at Menlo Park having their own Error 37 moment if the traffic doesn't cooperate. Different industry, same anxiety dream.
Anyway. If you're still fighting the login queue tonight, my only advice is the same advice everyone's giving: keep the launcher open, don't spam-click retry because it seems to actually push you back in line, and go make a sandwich. It'll clear eventually. And if you're one of the lucky ones who got in clean on night one, go kill Diablo already and stop reading blog posts about server errors.
I'll probably write something once I've actually finished a playthrough instead of just yelling about login screens. For now my Barbarian is stuck on Skeleton King and I have work in six hours, so that's where tonight's post ends.