I had a plan, it was going to be great.
May 14th, around 11 o’clock pm I’d take a few hour nap, wake up at 3am EST and Diablo like crazy.
May 15th, 3am rolls around and I’m at the computer but Diablo 3 is still sleeping.
Now it was nothing on my end, God knows I spent the better part of the week preloading and installing the game so I could be ready the second the clock stuck 3, no, it was Blizzard’s who wasn’t ready.
In order to play Diablo 3 you have to be online the entire time you play, it’s called “always online” and it works just as it sounds. You need to be on always in order to play. I just don’t need to log on to activate, I don’t need to start the game online and then if I go offline while playing that session everything is ok, I always have to be connected online. This is great for something like World of Warcraft that’s completely online but Diablo 3 has a single player portion of it’s game and I couldn’t even play that portion of the game unless Blizzard’s servers worked.[pullquote_right]Gaming should have stressful moments but the act of playing the game should not be stressful[/pullquote_right]
I respect any company trying to protect itself but I have a hard time getting behind always on games simple because we don’t live in a world where they’re error free. In a perfect word I would have been playing Diablo 3 at 3am when it launched, instead it took hours for the game to be stable enough not to boot me out of it. Playing a game turns into a stressful ordeal when every minute you’re wondering if this is the last you’re going to be able to play because a server may go down somewhere.
Once this problem is fixed on Blizzard’s end it’s not going to be settled though, if they get their business taken care of what about the millions of people who have to make sure everything stays solid on their end? It’s one thing to make sure your household’s internet is stable but what happens if your ISP wants to interrupt service for a half hour while they repair or change something on their network? That means being booted out of the game and depending on what happens you may or may not have an up to date save.
Gaming should have stressful moments but the act of playing the game should not be stressful, always online prevents that from happening.
In a perfect world we all have stable internet connections, in the future I also don’t have panic disorder, I have to do deal with what’s happening now and so should other companies. For related post about alternatives to fiber which is the best option for gaming, you can read here about the benefits of ethernet broadband and its cost.
Things have to change.