Diablo 3 servers severely stressed as open beta ends
The Diablo 3 stress test ended today with mixed results for gamers. Some had a great time, while others had trouble getting in at all.
The Diablo 3 stress test beta ended today after a weekend of frustrations and log in trouble for many, but it offered a boatload of data for Blizzard in preparation for the game's highly anticipated launch on May 15.
While stress tests are not known for running smoothly, the error messages started early for people trying to get into the beta on Friday, mostly facing log in and Error 37 server full errors. Blizzard Community Manager Micah Whipple (aka Bashiok to the Diablo community) tweeted that he guesstimated the servers hit around 300,000 concurrent users on Saturday.
While there were plenty of issues for Blizzard to deal with, many players did get to play and reported enjoyable experiences. The beta only allowed users to hit level 13, ending with the Skeleton King, which is the beginning chuck of the first act in the game. Unfortunately, all players will have to show for their weekend will be stories, as everything will be wiped and testers will start fresh when the game launches.
Meanwhile, the game's Darkness Falls, Heroes Rise website continues to reveal new information. Two more developer videos have been unveiled, while Blizzcast 17 was unlocked this weekend. A new character class video is expected to be released tomorrow highlighting either the Witch Doctor or the Wizard.
While you wait, check out the BlizzCast and learn how they got the sound of breaking bones.
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replyJohn Keefer posted a new article, Diablo 3 servers severely stressed as open beta ends.
The Diablo 3 stress test ended today with mixed results for gamers. Some had a great time, while others had trouble getting in at all.-
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Yeah, I was in the D2 beta and this time around decided to sit it out until launch. I am really looking forward to the game, though. Problem is there are so many things on my backlog that I'm going to have to bump some games.
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That is one aspect that really annoyed me. I'm playing SP without even opening the game to public and it still lagged when my latency was spiking. When I was playing it at around 230ms latency it was still running great.
I'm sure when europe servers are open I'll have a much better experience but overall I loved the game.
I tried every one of the classes and each time I start one, I say to myself that this is my favorite. I jump and start the second and the same feeling rises again :).
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For a good laugh, head to Blizzard's D3 Beta forums. For every person complaining about how terrible the servers held up, their are twenty more fanboys decrying them as 'entitled' and 'snowflakes' and other stupid shit. It's hilarious. I really thought only bad press sites used 'Entitled Gamers' as an insult. Boy was I wrong.
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People have even been throwing "Entitled" around in the Tera chat channels. There's no escaping it at the mo.
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People bitching that you can't play single player because the servers are overloaded is a legitimate complaint. Keep sucking that sweet sweet Blizzard dong. (I say as I get more and more hyped for D3)
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It's exactly what you referenced. People couldn't play SINGLE PLAYER in a beta because the servers were too stressed. Single Player. Servers too stressed. You see how people might be pissed off about that? Yeah, try to keep the logic train flowing.
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Indeed, and it wasn't a problem with the D2 beta, because everyone knew that when the game was released, it didn't matter if the servers couldn't handle it at first because there was still single player.
Sadly that isn't the case with D3, so people are rightfully upset that Blizzard completely dropped it's shit with the servers.-
This was a stress test. The intent was to gauge the limit of their hardware and to find additional problems with their setup. In these situations, you're going to intentionally put it into configurations designed to stress out particular components beyond what's expected when it goes live.
If you followed the news, you could see the different stages of the test activities to gauge the behavior of their system. Example -- when they brought the servers back online and were slowly increasing the active populations, that was to determine where the various breaking points were.
Blizzard hasn't "dropped its shit with the servers" yet. This was a testing activity so they can make sure they don't drop their shit when the game goes live. -
The whole point of a stress test is to push the servers to the limit and see where the failures are and figure out how to prevent them in the future. If no one got any error messages and could play the whole weekend then they weren't performing a stress test.
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Walker's right. The only reason there WAS an open weekend was to test the servers. It was a beta, not a demo. They weren't there so you could play single player unmolested.
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During release? Everyone has the right to complain. During stress test, no. Also, why are you calling it a single player game? It's clearly not. There is no "single player" portion of Diablo at all. You have to intentionally choose to disallow people from joining you. Call it anti-social maybe. It's certainly not single player as the term suggests.
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Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 both had full single-player experiences. You are wrong. This is the first game in the series that hasn't allowed the option.
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Fallout 3 was an FPRPG. God damn you are an idiot. Are you a Republican by chance? Your arguments have the same sort of cousin-fucking logic as Mitt Romney, is why I ask.
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No decent game ever has required always-on online, aside from games that are impossible to enjoy alone (I.E. MMOs and team-based FPS games geared around a community, like TF2). So no, it isn't matter of what D2 did. It's a matter of what ever game ever before it has done, and what a horrible precedent it is setting.
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Diablo 1 and 2 were released over ten years ago, in an era where always-on Internet connectivity was not common. They also suffered from serious issues with people hacking the game and items in it. Blizzard is essentially resolving all of these issues, by making the decision to not support a way of playing the game that will be used by basically nobody.
When the retail game is released, you'd have to be a fucking moron to play it in a single player capacity, when most of the game including the entire end game experience is built around party-centric gameplay. People are bitching for two reasons: (1) they have a half-baked idea that they want to be able to play this on their laptop when they're at the airport, and (2) they're unhappy that the servers are down during the STRESS TEST and they want to participate in what they believe is a demo for their enjoyment (never mind that they'd never play the game in single player otherwise). Regarding the first point, deal with it. This is how the game designer wants you to play the game. You don't expect WoW or Tribes to indulge your niche desire to play single player. You've got other games that'll work at the airport, like Torchlight if you really want an ARPG. Regarding the second point, Google "stress test" and see if you can find a definition.
But you're mostly just being a jackass on the Internet, so I doubt you'll consider any of this. With any luck you'll just get banned.-
I played D2 exclusively offline
Where is your god now? -
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Hi Ebu!
I try to reserve a call-out for people who really deserve it. Anybody who has no extenuating Internet connectivity circumstancesand would willingly lock themselves out of a multiplayer experience, in a game that can hypothetically be played alone but is heavily designed to be played in a group, is a fucking moron. Period.
I can give you a giant list of reasons why this game benefits from being played on Battle.Net. As a programmer, I know that it would be a substantial amount of extra work to support offline play, and would open up the game to reverse engineering and thus to hacks.
Given these fairly obvious costs to developing and supporting this, what are the compelling reasons to include a mode that holds zero interest to 99% of the player base? Other than "someday I might want to play it in an airport".
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Fallacy.
Just because one person making an argument decends to name-calling does not render the position invalid, although it might be argued that that person can no longer represent it.
Just as one person's inability to prove a point in a debate does not "prove" that the point is incorrect.
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It's not a legitimate complaint about single player. Were you confused about the game being online only? Did they advertise it as something other than online only? They made a choice, for several obvious reasons (probably more non-obvious ones). The game is as it is, it's not a bug that it's online only, that is a major design decision that has been made (long ago).
During the stress test, it's pretty clear that you will experience server issues. That's the point. If it is like this during retail, we all have the right to complain that their chosen infrastructure was inadequate. Right now? No.-
Were you confused when they advertised this burger as having been between my asscheeks? This burger was between my asscheeks, and never did they advertise it as anything else. You should swallow this hamburger as is, from between my buttcheeks.
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You don't have an argument here. You don't like the change they made - fine. But that was months ago when that was announced. Did you expect it to have changed? Ok so this is the first time because you never read the news. You seem to have the internet, what's the problem with an online game?
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Because if I pay for a game, I want to be able to play it, regardless of whether Blizzard is able to afford and upkeep their servers. Or what if my internet goes out? Or what if I simply stop playing? What if I'm in some other situation where I simply can't be connected to the internet? It's a stupid and intrusive system, and while you can say that it doesn't bother you, personally, and by god that is your right, if you try to tell someone else to just take it you are in fact asking them to eat an ass sandwich.
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if I pay for a game, I want it to be free from hacks and cheaters. They can ruin MP all the time, instead of the situations you describe ruining SP a very small amount of the time.
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And you think always-online will someone -stop- people from fucking around with the game? That's cute.
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The game isn't "always online" just for the purposes of drm. Everything in the game world is handled server side. The client is trusted for some character position information, but everything else is handled server side.
This means some level of speed hacks will be possible, but that's mostly it. The rest of the stuff will be solid (barring some bugs on their side), because the client doesn't control it.-
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Always online DRM is not online cheat prevention, they are two separate things. Cheat prevention is full proof if it is online, no wall hacks, no speed hacks, no locator's, no treasure/mob packet sniffers, none of these things will exist due to online only... (if you missed it, these things happen in online games, and will continue to happen, and being online does not prevent this)
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Ebu calls D3's server side world "always online drm."
There's no online component in D3 specific for drm. The battle.net implementation -- which includes hosting all game world decisions on their servers -- is a sort of drm, but also serves as cheat protection.
Speed hacks are hard to root out because games get incredibly jerky if some of the position information isn't trusted from the client. Anything that the client is trusted with can be exploited.
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prevalence of cheating/hacks in MMOs vs every other online game? yeah...
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What if your power goes out? Does Blizzard have to chopper in generators too? You know that it's an online-supported game. Whether you want to solo it or not, it's the only way to keep integrity for MP. If you want some sort of single player experience where the characters are saved on your HD and not useable for MP, well, they took your suggestion under consideration and decided not to do it.
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Remember kids, Shit Sandwich, tastes great
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Well, I think it's perfectly fine because I've seen how well they run the WoW servers and my connection is pretty much bulletproof and excellent, but maybe this game isn't for you. Perhaps you should just play Dungeon Siege III. I hear it's pretty cheap on Steam.
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It doesn't matter what bothers me. The game is going to be online only. Just like WoW. It's not like they can flick a switch and make it offline capable. If you don't like it, don't support them!
I wanted offline play too, perhaps you ignored that in my posts. It's not my choice though, and I don't mind online only play because multiplayer makes the game significantly more fun.-
Exactly, WoW is an MMO. I hate MMOs. I think they are the lowest form of gaming, and are geared towards social recluses and absolute idiots. I will never buy WoW, because it is not my kind of game.
Know what is my kind of game? The Diablo series. Yes, it is -more fun with other people- apparently (How having to devout time without being able to pause and go do other stuff, all while dealing with a bunch of other morons is 'fun' is beyond me). I like Diablo, I want more Diablo, hell I've been waiting ten years for another Diablo. And now they are trying to make it WoW-Lite. If you think it makes me entitled to tell someone they are fucking up, then you're a child. If I saw you fucking a dog while I walked down the street, I wouldn't think to myself 'Well, it's not my cup of tea, so I guess I'll just move along', I'd get a baseball bat and chase you off and report you to the cops. The same goes for corporations when they make shitty products. It isn't enough to just not buy it because I know millions of retards are GOING to buy it anyway, and Blizzard will keep making games shittier and shittier because people are so complacent. So I have to -say- that it is shit, let them know just how much I think they are fucking up. Will it help? No, probably not, because for every person who is willing to tell people that they are messing up, there are three more people ready to gobble down the shit sandwich and defend the company serving it to them.-
What the fuuuuuu....
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If you buy the game, you're doing it with the knowledge that Blizzard is setting certain restrictions in place. You're presumably a big boy that can understand this kind of thing. Paying money for a game doesn't mean you can "play it however you want to", it means you can play it in accordance with the EULA and all that. This isn't rocket science.
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EricZBA is the new something
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I have no idea how WoW works, but if anyone has a problem with purple stuff they are certainly no friend of mine.
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What's a "snowflake"?
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Apparently if you want to play the beta but it's crashing single player because of server load, you think you're a super special 'snowflake'. At least that's what I gathered. I didn't wander around there long.
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That's like the console gamers here when a shitty PC port happens
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They've said the beta goes about as far as Blood Raven in D2. But that said you could walk straight to Blood Raven much far than you can get to Leoric in the beta.
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Because that would make it twice as long as Diablo 2 and I don't think Blizzard was unhappy with the length of that game. Plus the longevity of the game doesn't stem from the length of its story, so there isn't any reason to make it long as much as making what is in the game neat.
And to put specific numbers on it, I think calling the final game 25 times longer puts it at about 40 hours. Only 20 - 25 hours is my expectation. Of course, everyone is going to play it for much longer looking for phat lewts.
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Why not? Skyrim is easily a 60-80 hour game if you complete all the instanced quests (non-fetch/random).
25x ~4 hours = 100 hours. -
I think it's highly likely that it's at least ten times longer. 25? Who knows, could be on the high side.
But in any case there is much, much more to play.
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I think there are 4 acts.
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/game/-
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Our group had a lot of trouble getting in, between the server caps being throttled, and the servers being down (IE: it's a stress test, these things are expected) Once we did get in, things seemed pretty good. Played mostly 3-4p games, variety of classes (including an epic 3 WD run). Noticed a little bit of rubberbanding from time to time, but mostly very smooth.
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considering they went from around 300-400 games on average to about 275,000 games available I think they did really well.
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Nightmare, and it's not. That's not how the game is designed, you need to have progressed through normal to get the level and equipment required to tackle it, including probably farming some bosses.
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Trust me. I know.
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hardcore is a permadeath thing. You can get to nightmare and hell with a hardcore character, too.
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Right. For subsequent play throughs you'll probably rush the lower level content as quickly as possible (if not have a higher level character power you through, like in D3) so you can get to the challenging stuff asap.
There is a hardcore mode. Your character goes through the same progression, but can only die once. -
Nope, to get to nightmare, a character must beat normal. You always start in normal. Succeeding in Nightmare would be a mathematical impossibility for a level 1 character.
Yes there is hardcore, and to unlock it for your account you simply must hit level 10 on any character. HC characters do not share gold or shared stash with non HC characters, and will have no access to the real money action house, gold auction house only. And if your HC character dies, all equipped gear is lost forever.-
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Correct, but the higher difficulties are much harder overall.
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I want Youtube to explode with D3 hardcore snuff films.
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I heard D3 was going to be the first game to have a ng+ option.
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Not sure if serious.....
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This is one of the systems that returned from Diablo 2, because it was awesome and worked pretty well.
Really it's compromise between the desire for endless gameplay/progress/combat and telling a story. If they add more story content the story gets too complex and hard to follow. If they space out the story points with bigger areas, the pacing starts to suck as it takes much longer to get to story points.
It also allows less experienced gamers to experience the whole story to completion, while allowing veteran gamers to further develop their characters.
Honestly I wish more games did progressive difficulties as well as Diablo does. And it is done well. Some gear modifiers or monster abilities only exist in the higher difficulties, so it's new challenges and new reqards, that require new tactics.
TLDR: Awesome-
I would like if they borrowed a page from Titan Quest and added a few small unique bits to higher difficulties. A miniboss that only shows up in NM/Hell, a small unique area or two, etc.
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We don't know for sure, but I'd bet thats the case with Diablo 3 as well. Though probably not as crafted. You may see a randomized champion in nightmare that abilities that didn't appear in normal. And they do have a ton of random events that appear, even just in beta, a tiny handful of which you see in a single play through.
It would be cool though if they crafted some mini events purely for higher difficulties though. -
The developer diary spoke of the fact that it is mathematically impossible to play through all the areas that are available to the randomized acts/dungeons. Also, included in that are quest mobs that may or may not appear (if I heard that correctly). Finally, some bosses have special perks only at higher difficulty levels.
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That's sorta what made D2 awesome. You beat it on normal difficulty with a character that's a total badass and fucking shit up left and right with all this awesome gear, and then you start again on nightmare and fucking quillrats are kicking your ass right outside of the starting town even though you're just as decked out and badass as you were before.
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because we've played Diablo before
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Worst beta ever! Couldn't even log in and it's over already? lol. I felt like a guinea pig testing their server stress crap. I don't give a damn about their stupid tests...I want to test the game for myself!
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WAT!?
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Kept trying throughout the day and every day. Kept giving the same connection error. meh...
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