It wasn't meant to be a perfect analogy. I didn't spend more than 2 seconds thinking it up. This game was in development for God only knows how long and they obviously released a broken game. Blizzard isn't some start up company. They've been around for a long time and it's ridiculous that things are so messed up at this point. If things were messed up at the start then they should have waited. You can't release a game and make what was it $400 mllion in sales and now NOBODY can play it. It's incompetence. Again, we're not talking about a game that just a few people bought from some nerd's garage. It set sales records right? This shouldn't happen.

And for the record, I had no idea it was an online only game. I most likely would have bought it anyway, but being in the fine print somewhere doesn't constitute making it clear in my book.

I'm not a hardcore gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but I've bought and played MANY video games in my life and this is the FIRST time I've bought a game, tried to play it and can't simply because the company I bought it from can't figure out how to make their shit work.

The biggest issue I have with it is that they have a huge issue dating to Wow of having unstable servers all day on Tuesday's after patches.

So they will go online and offline all day even after their announced end estimate of 11 am. In fact often that estimate gets pushed back over and over again for most of the day.

They really need to improve on their testing of patches before implementing them. It was frustrating for me when I play Wow and even worse when I play a single player game like Diablo 3.

I honestly can care less about piracy when I pay for a game. People who pirate software should be inconvenienced not those of us who paid them money.

Edited to say I see they added the error 37 mini-game back in this patch.

Your stash is shared between characters, you can always make a new toon just to store on the toon, there is a lot of space on them . I have 2 toons now just for this reason.

it's not morning anymore.

It's not in the fine print, it's right on the back of the box. Personally I'm glad they didn't mess up the artwork with a huge "Requires internet" on the front. Whenever I buy a pc game I ALWAYS look at the back of the box to look at the requirements, there is no reason not to.

And it's maintence, servers have maintence. Nothing works 100% of the time, not even offline games. I don't see how you are screaming incompetence when you just had the bad luck of buying it right when a patch it and the servers starting having some issues because of it. Could it have gone a bit better? Sure, but don't start flinging around words like that when you have no idea of the gravity of problems they are dealing with.

How about a pc release that was an mmo that when you patched the game your computer would no longer start up because it deleted the boot.ini from your root directory
And Eve online is a pretty big game

That is incompetence, some server issues, not so much.If you want ACTUAL game breaking bugs then look here http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...ameBreakingBug

Would you rather this?
And that was THQ, not a company the size of blizzard, but not small by any means.

Sadly, things are going to break. Just take it in stride and don't get yourself worked up so much over it. I couldn't play for the first 2 days after it launched and I found other stuff to do.

This post is not really directed mainly at you so there is no offense intended, I'm just trying to say that getting mad about it really isn't going to solve it. The game is still great and a few bugs or outages will happen no matter what you do, it is still far worth 60 dollars.

I honestly don't think that piracy was the #1 goal of the always online rule. If you ever played Diablo 2, you know it was plagued with all sorts of hacks. D3 can't afford to have any hacks, since there is a real money auction house involved. The best way to avoid the kind of hacks you saw in D2 is to require all your saved characters to only exist on the server, and have constant server interaction to make sure nothing funny is going on.

As bad as the gold auction house is I doubt the real money one will get much attention. I know I would not trust my money on their Ah system.

They do keep pushing it back, I would hope they are using that time to make it and the gold AH more stable.

It doesn't prevent piracy at all. Steam games are easily cracked. Every Ubisoft game since Assassin's Creed 2 has required you to be online, and they have all been cracked. I haven't checked to see if Diablo 3 has been cracked yet, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it has been.

Except those just do online checks to see if you're online

I don't believe this game even has a way of saving characters locally. It would take some heavy server emulation to crack this one.

Yeah, until somebody puts out an alternate server you can't play D3 with a pirated copy.

I'm guessing Chinese gold farmers will buy up every worthwhile item from the regular gold auction site, and list it on the real money one.

Assassin's Creed 2 saved your game on the Ubisoft servers as well. The pirates were able to create an emulated server. It took them about a month or so, but they did it. I am sure the same will happen with Diablo 3. Nothing really stops the pirates. At best they are just slowed down.

There's a big difference between an always-on connection and simply saving a game on the servers. Not saying that it's impossible, but emulating the D3 servers will be exponentially more difficult than emulating Ubisoft's AC servers.

Yep, though I have to wonder how the emulated WoW servers work. Did the server source code leak/get stolen, or did they really reverse engineer it? I would guess the D3 servers would take something similar.

How so? AC2 required you to always be online and everything was saved on the servers instead of your hard drive. How is that any different than Diablo 3?

Diablo 3 does real time combat calculations and dungeon generation server side. The client is constantly talking to the server. This is how they are able to hot fix certain things without us having to download a patch. It's not just checking into to save games.

That's what I was thinking also, and don't forget the loot algorithm is probably on the servers too, and diablo 3 without the loot is just not as fun.

For what its worth, its actually on at least 5 places on the box. Each side has the text "Internet Connection Required" on it. WoW was the same way, although there were also people that bought that game not knowing it was online only as well.

It prevents some level of piracy. I think people always incorrectly judge piracy prevention as silly just because cracks come out; while cracks and emulated servers and what not do eventually come out, what it does do is make it difficult for the average joe to pirate the game. No more just burning the disc or downloading the ISO and installing the game to play which was fairly easy to do.

How many "average joes" are really PC gamers though? Most PC gamers are fairly technically literate. If a gamer doesn't want to mess with the technical side, he generally just sticks with console games.

With 7 million people playing Diablo, a lot.

Blizzard games are the exception to the rule. Just because someone plays a new PC game once every five years doesn't really make him a PC gamer. He just likes Blizzard games, but not really PC gaming in general. So I would still say that actual PC gamers who play more than one game every five years are still more technically minded than the "average joe."

I don't know about that. I've been reading the hacking threads in the forum, and it seems that everybody who plays is a IT Security expert who has the the game installed on a brand new computer as the only program apart from the best anti-virus and malware scanners available.

Which is nice, but we're talking specifically about how Diablo III is online only and how it can prevent piracy. That said, there's certainly a lot of people that play games like The Sims still and the random game here and there. It's not a catch all, but enough to dissuade some people. That's all.

DIII uptime will soon be at 99% and all will be good.

I did have an hour free to play yesterday and was disappointed to see the server was down but somehow I lived.

as a level 18 or 19 wizard i'm still using Magic Missile and that Arcane thing that blows up when it hit a mob. They seem to have the best "does X% of weapon damage" numbers. Am I doing it wrong? seems like some of the new spells i'm getting should be better