So I had this whole evening planned out. Diablo III went live at midnight Pacific last night, which meant for me it was rolling around in the middle of the afternoon my time today, and I'd cleared basically nothing off my schedule because come on, it's a video game, how hard could logging in be.
Famous last words.
If you haven't seen it yet, the thing everybody's calling "Error 37" is this authentication error Blizzard's servers throw when they can't handle the login queue. And apparently nobody at Blizzard, a company that has launched exactly one billion online games at this point, thought that literally millions of people mashing the login button at the same second might be a capacity problem worth stress-testing. I got it maybe two dozen times before I ever saw a character select screen. Two dozen. I started keeping a tally on a sticky note like it was some kind of drinking game, except the drink was rage.
Here's the part that actually bugs me, more than the queue itself. Diablo III requires you to be online even to play by yourself. Solo, single-player, nobody-else-in-the-game online. There is no offline mode. I get that it cuts down on piracy and lets them do the real-money auction house thing they've been talking up, but it also means that when their login servers get overwhelmed (which, again, on launch day of one of the most anticipated PC games in a decade, is not exactly an edge case), the entire game is just unplayable. Not "some features degraded." Unplayable. I still have my old Diablo II CD key taped inside a jewel case in a drawer somewhere and I could install that thing on a laptop with the wifi off and it would run fine forever. That's not nothing.
I finally got in around 6pm, four-ish hours after I first tried, and I will say the first hour or so of actually playing was genuinely great. The intro cinematic still gives me chills a little, and the art direction on the New Tristram stuff is gorgeous even scaled down on my aging graphics card. Whoever did the sound design deserves a raise, the ambient stuff in the cathedral level is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But every time the connection so much as hiccuped I'd get bumped and have to re-queue, and around 9pm it happened three times in twenty minutes and I just closed the client and went to make dinner instead. Overcooked some pasta because I was annoyed and not paying attention. Not the game's fault, but I'm blaming it anyway.
Blizzard put out a statement basically saying they underestimated demand and they're adding capacity, which, fine, I believe them, this isn't some conspiracy. Twelve years is a long wait since Diablo II and people showed up in numbers that apparently broke their models. But "we didn't expect this many people to want to play our extremely popular sequel to an extremely popular game" is a strange thing to say out loud in 2012 when every big launch of the last few years has had exactly this problem. Sim City did it. Various MMO launches have done it for a decade. You'd think someone in a planning meeting would've said "hey, what if it's more than we think."
Separate thing entirely, but worth a mention since it happened the same week: Yahoo's CEO, Scott Thompson, stepped down on Sunday after it came out that his official bio claimed a computer science degree he never actually earned. Four months into the job. That's a wild way to go out, and it's a bad look for a company that's already been through more leadership churn than it can really afford right now. I don't have a ton to say about it beyond that, but it felt like the kind of thing worth writing down before the news cycle moves on to whatever's next.
Anyway. I'm going to try logging back into Diablo III in a bit, once the dinner dishes are done, and see if the queue's calmed down any. If it hasn't, there's always the CD key in the drawer.