Blizzard piss away some money. Meanwhile Diablo 3 could use some work, fuckers.
I was very, very late to the Diablo party, to the point that I didn't actually rate D2 that highly, what with its ancient graphics and clunky interface. So I thought D3 might be a good "in", and that I would benefit from not being burdened by the unconditional love many people have for the previous games, in the event that D3 dared to deviate from the formula.
But first things first, my experience of actually downloading and installing the game was fucking awful. Blizzard are one of these arrogant rich companies that think it's clever to have a peer-to-peer download system built into their installer. Hey Blizzard, if you want to use MY bandwidth to distribute YOUR fucking game, how about you pay me? What's that? You still want $60 for the game even though it's a digital download and you don't even have to provide sufficient dedicated bandwidth? Fuck OFF you CUNTS.
So yes I turned that shit off straight away. But it turned out that here in the colonies, with or without the P2P I was getting shit-all downloaded. It would start off at a healthy 1-2MB/s (yes megabytes) but then immediately drop off to nothing until I restarted the download. After about 24 hours and 2% downloaded I took the only sensible course of action and downloaded a torrent of the install disk. In fact I torrented it to a remote machine and copied it to my home machine before the installer had reached 3%. Good job Blizzard. This didn't bode well for a game which is notorious for requiring an always-on network connection.
Anyway it still took a while to install the game, as it presumably downloaded patches that had been released since the dvd went gold. But it got there eventually.
So, what about the game? Well to start with it's important to understand that D3 isn't so much a game as a tool to enable Blizzard to make money from their delayed-due-to-rampant-account-hacking (not that they'll admit it) Real Money Auction House. When you frame it that way, the design decisions start to make sense. This is a game about items, and you can (eventually) buy items from the RMAH, and Blizzard make money from those purchases, therefore it's in their interest to make you dependent on the RMAH if you want to advance to the highest levels by having absurdly stingy drop rates for the most part, at least when it comes to items your character can actually use.
Although in all honesty that doesn't really affect me. I couldn't give fewer fucks about "beating" the game on the higher levels. I'll be content to go through it once on normal difficulty, and maybe engage in a little (non-public) co-op action now and again. I'll be happy with whatever limited bling I acquire in the regular course of playing, and have absolutely no intention of giving Blizzard or Chinese farmers or some sweaty, masturbating basement-dweller any more money by using the auction house.
But I have to return to the always-on connection requirement. What a fucking load of shit. So many reports of connection errors, and I've had my share of being booted out immediately after logging in, not to mention rubber-banding and lag in game. Like I said, a load of fucking shit. I'm sitting there playing a single-player game, I don't care about PvP or the RMAH so cheating does not even factor into the game for me, and yet it's like playing an overcrowded MMO. Even the Guild Wars 2 beta had less lag, and there were thousands of other real life people in that game world.
It is so fucking stupid it's barely possible to describe the fucking stupidity adequately. And of course the real reasons are all to do with the RMAH. And Blizzard have just gone dark while they wait for the number of players to die down so that the server congestion becomes less of a problem, rather than offer apologies and provide adequate capacity for the paying customers playing right now. People like to point out how World of Warcraft subscriptions are on the decline, but Blizzard are still raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from that game. This is absolutely a company with the resources to do these things "right", but just not the motivation it seems. But it's ok because they spunked away thousands on celebrating the (financially) successful launch.
Given my so far limited time with the game I tend to agree with those who suggest that Diablo 3 could not possibly have taken the last decade to produce. More like a couple of years, while the actual talent at the company was siphoned into developing the RMAH and whatever inevitable paid DLC that's going to appear. D3 isn't so much a game as a glorified PayPal which only lets you send money to Blizzard Activision.
