One Week of Diablo III!
Well.. I say a week.. heh. Launch day was a no-go, with Blizzard having somehow been unaware of how many of their customers would actually want to play, and the servers being unable to cope with this demand. These problems continued the following day, with connection problems, lag, and maintenance on the Battle.net servers.. and still they weren’t finished, as there was yet more surprise downtime and maintenance later on during the week.
The only positive thing that could be said for Blizzard in this was that they got on with the maintenance straight away.. but they should have had some indication of demand from pre-order and sales figures, and from the open beta weekend which was plagued with the same problems, and they should have ensured that their systems were ready to deal with it.
Anyway.. I went with the Demon Hunter, with plans to play the game through alone, at my own pace.. with exploration, reading all the journals, watching all the cutscenes and playing with the crafting system a bit too. I had a friend drag me through Diablo II ages back, and didn’t get to explore or enjoy the story; that isn’t going to happen again.
The first part of the game was available during the open beta.. and available as a trial of the game via the Starter Edition or Guest Passes. The first part of Act 1, up to the Skeleton King, seemed to play the same as during Beta, ignoring the random elements of course!
Be Mine.. Or Not..
The traffic to Groupee’s Be Mine games and music bundle was rather more than expected, with the site going down almost as soon as the bundle came on sale.
Server capacity is currently being boosted, and the bundle, along with the Antisleep music bundle, will be relaunched tomorrow instead.
Be Mine will contains five games: Wasteland Angel, Sideway New York, Xotic, Beep and The Ball. Customers can pay what they want, with a minimum of $1, and 20% of the proceeds will be given to Child’s Play.