This just makes me furious. Diablo III is primarily an online game. To ensure legitimacy within their game they must have it online (anyone who played D2 will know the difference between Open and Closed BNet). Diablo III is basically just the closed bnet version. It's not that big of a deal, I still managed to play the game for 6 hours yesterday after my long workday. When the servers were down I was doing homework...when the servers were up I wasn't eating dinner. I mean, it really wasn't that bad.

Sure it would be nice to play offline but players are blowing it out of proportion - D3 is primarily an ONLINE game. Other games that featured always-on DRM were not primarily online and thus the question arose as to why they needed it like that.

EDIT: Although there's no reason they couldn't include a standalone SP experience that did not require it (although that's what this always-online is for...drm to protect against pirates?)

It's actually not possible with the way the DRM was implemented. Almost all of the scripting runs entirely server-side, so even if someone bypassed the online requirement, the game would be broken. People lashed out at Ubisoft for having always-online DRM, but this is worse, since the game actually depends on it.

I'm not a fan of it - ultimately accepting DRM like this will mean more developers will follow suit. That said, it's no reason to give Diablo a 3.6 or whatever. People should just take a break, Blizzard will get the connection issues sorted out very soon I'm sure.

So... I ready that D3 had over 2 million pre-orders. Couple that with people who don't bother to pre-order and throw them all online at once with a rather bulky "Always on DRM" system and of course you're going to get hellish server load. It'll be cleared up and it's a shame they didn't prepare better for it, but what exactly are you going to do?

Also, the whole metacritic thing is just the internet tards being stupid.

Well a bit disappointed right now in it... I just went to play and the servers are down. After my late night class all I was hoping for was a quick fix with a friend and then off to sleep I go but those plans may be shot.

Also apparently Skidrow found a way around the online drm (not sure how well it works though, I know there was a workaround for AC with its DRM that required emulating a server basically). Either way the real frustration I have right now is the amount of server downtime with a game that relies on it to run.

I definitely think some folks use Metacritic as a means to crap all over a game that may be good just to be a bunch of jerks, but I mean, in this instance, I can't fault them entirely when they don't have the opportunity to play a game they paid for.

I'd be surprised if someone bypassed it already, might be a fake. The DRM for AC took them awhile to crack initially and it wasn't as invasive as this. I think AC only stored saves server-side, so they had to emulate that, but with Diablo a whole bunch of game code runs on the servers. That's why you see people complaining about lag in single player.

I was wondering about that (a lot of it is server side). I'm going to look into it a bit more since I heard it in passing. It took them nearly a month to crack AC's DRM if I recall. EDIT: Looks like it wasn't cracked, just released online (meaning the installer, no crack)

Starfriend that is all.

Give it a year max and I'm sure there will be a stable playable starfriend type client for Diablo 3.

Who is David Sanchez does he go on the forms at all?

He's an awesome new editor/news writer and yes he does go on the forums, just look a few posts above you