So it's been nine days since Diablo III came out and I think I've finally stopped clenching my jaw every time I open the launcher. Small victories.
If you somehow missed it: Blizzard launched the game at midnight on May 15th, with the usual costume-party lines outside GameStops and midnight release parties that I am, apparently, still too old for (I found this out the hard way around 1am, standing in a parking lot in Fremont with a guy dressed as a Barbarian, questioning my life choices). And then approximately nobody could log in.
Error 37. "We are unable to log you in right now." I must have seen that screen four hundred times that first weekend. Blizzard said something like 6,000 people were in the queue for my region at one point, and that's not even counting the people who couldn't get a queue number at all and just got bounced straight back to the error. My friend Dev, who pre-ordered the collector's edition and took the day off work for this, didn't get into an actual game until almost 6pm the next day. He works in software. He was not gracious about it.
Here's the thing that actually bugs me, more than the queues themselves, which I sort of expected honestly, Blizzard launches are never smooth, ask anyone who played WoW at release. What bugs me is that Diablo III requires a constant internet connection even to play solo. Single player. No multiplayer, no other humans involved, just you and a Barbarian and some skeletons, and you still need Blizzard's servers to be up and happy or you get kicked to the menu mid-fight. I lost a chunk of progress on Wednesday because my connection blipped for maybe four seconds while my ISP was doing whatever it does, and the game just dumped me out. Diablo II, which I put an unreasonable number of hours into back in 2001 on a computer with a CRT monitor the size of a microwave, worked completely offline if you wanted it to. This is a step backward dressed up as a feature.
And I think I know why it's set up this way, even if Blizzard won't quite say it in those words: the real money auction house. You'll be able to buy and sell in-game items for actual dollars, Blizzard takes a cut, and none of that works, or at least none of it works in a way Blizzard can control and monetize, if the game can run disconnected from their servers. They've already delayed the RMAH once since launch, last I checked it's not live yet, but the always-online requirement that makes it possible is very much already baked into the game whether you plan to use the auction house or not. I don't personally care about buying gold with real money. I just resent that the architecture for it is now mandatory overhead for people who never wanted it.
None of this is stopping me from playing, to be clear. That's sort of the annoying part. I've put in something like 30 hours since launch, I'm through Act II on Nightmare with my Demon Hunter, and it's still just really good moment-to-moment. The loot still feels good to pick up. The skill rune system is a genuinely nice evolution from Diablo II's talent trees. I'm complaining about the plumbing, not the house.
A quick aside, unrelated except that it's also been eating my week: everyone's still talking about Facebook's stock, which is now trading noticeably under its $38 IPO price from last Friday. I don't have any particular insight there, I didn't buy in, I just find it funny how fast the narrative flipped from "biggest tech IPO ever" to "did anyone actually check the numbers on this thing." Feels like it'll be the story of the month regardless of what I write here.
Anyway. If you're still fighting Error 37 at this point, I'm sorry, and also, weirdly, kind of impressed by your patience. I gave up trying to log in around day three and just went and did yard work instead, which is not something Diablo has ever made me do before.