I already had the annual pass. Spent the first 90 minutes or so this morning trying to login but like everyone, I was thwarted by all the connection errors. I decided to pass out and play early in the morning. Game’s a ton of fun. Playing the Diablo 3 beta, I already had a solid idea of what to expect and how the game play would work out. My impressions of the gameplay itself were already favorable. I ended up being disappointed with the connection and logging in issues. On the one hand, I felt that Blizzard should have been prepared for the volume of traffic that would be impacting their servers. On the other hand, I think there’s way more people playing than even Blizzard anticipated!
Thinking back to Cataclysm, the launch of that was incredibly smooth. There weren’t many server crashes or login errors or any of that stuff. The only bottleneck was that stupid question Vashj’ir where you had to click that conch shell to breathe and everyone on the server was trying to breathe underwater.
I made a Wizard. She’s level 11 right now. Her name’s Anivia and specializes in frost attacks and abilities.
My battletag is Matticus#1773 .
Anyway, where I screwed up on is that I didn’t pre-order the collector’s edition. After checking with every Walmart, Futureshop, Best Buy, and EB Games in Vancouver, they were all sold out. Normally I’m diligent with collector’s editions. If it’s something I really want, I‘d head over there and set it aside but it wasn’t until recently that I decided I really wanted to get it. When I tried pre-ordering it, the places weren’t accepting orders anymore.
Epic disappointment and fail on my part.
Oh well.
Thats ok 🙂 I was hoping blizzard was going to test their product before release 🙁 I am disappointed as well.
I ordered it from Walmart Canada as it was the only place online I could find it. This was a couple days ago. it came in today. There is still hope!
Doubt it. It hink they’rew all sold out 🙁 .
Really, for the hour and a half it took for things to mostly stabilize, I was not dissapointed. I dunno, I feel surprised that people weren’t expecting it to be a huge clusterfrack. I even prepped a drinking game for server crashes and login problems and such. The reality is that after that initial burst of Everyone Must Play NOWNOWNOW they will never come NEAR those needs again. The cost to cope with it and to have enough bandwidth and such for just that tiny period is, imho, likely to be vastly higher than it is worth. Even with the bad PR. It amazes me that anyone thought that would go differently, since I suspect it would take Google level distribution to handle it.
I am quite enjoying it. There are bugs, but I can cope. I wish they had just stuck with the open/closed b.net system they had in D2 that allowed single player, offline, whatever. But it doesn’t bother me enough to forgo waiting most of my son’s life to play it with him. 🙂
I wish I had gotten a collector’s edition. But the cost was too much, and the b.net option pleasantly free with a wow sub I was going to have anyway. But I really liked it, with the pets for wow and the cool little soulstone USB drive that should have been 8 or 16G but is still cool.
@Tzivya And a Skull!
Hour and a half south, Bellingham, fred meyers… had CE edition of SC2 on the shelf a couple of weeks after release still.
That’s why I’m not playing right now, Matt. I pre-ordered my copy on amazon.com weeks ago, because it wasn’t (and still isn’t) on amazon.ca. Yesterday, I called around town, and it seems Ottawa is also out of CEs. I’d have just canceled my amazon order, as the damn thing still hasn’t even shipped.
Regardless, at least I am getting the CE… I just have to wait a little longer.
I regret not buying the CE for at least one of the household here, but I wasn’t even sure I would play my copy before I tried it. I did not get into the beta so I didn’t touch it until it released. We may look for it again later, but…lesson learned.
I hate Blizzard, they did’t some basic mistakes, like server drops and errors!
If you didn’t play Diablo 3 so far, try here: <a href=http://diablo3blizz.blogspot.com/>Diablo 3</a>