My copy of Diablo III remains ensconced somewhere at FedEx, awaiting delivery some time today (May 15). Which turned out to be a good thing since it saved me from being greeted with the now infamous, “Error 37” which many ran into during the launch of Diablo III on each regions server (Asia was 1st, then Europe, and finally, North America).
Given that this particular release has broken several presale records, the server issues were not surprising despite the fact that a few weeks earlier, Blizzard held an open beta stress test weekend. I was watching one live stream from around a half-hour before the North American server went live, and just around a minute prior to the servers coming online, the player began slamming the login process (pasting their password and attempting to logon). Now imagine, tens of thousands others doing this exact same thing simultaenously. All this does is create unnecessary requests. Anyone who has done any sort of IT infrastructure planning (systems and networking), knows that you can throw as much resources (hardware and bandwidth) into the mix, but the weakest link will always be how quickly, the backend software (database for example) can handle the amount of simultaneous transactions taking place.
Thus the “Error 37” was just the tip of the iceberg. And it didn’t help that many players were continually trying to connect, failing, and repeating the process in rapid fire fashion (only adding on to the load). Blizzard for their part, should have implemented a numbered queue system established to help alleviate the process of gamers continually whacking the servers simultaneously trying to just login (spamming the login button). Same thing can be said further into the process with character creation. If people see they are queued, they won’t continually try over and over again, adding on to the already huge load. It also doesn’t help that a design decision was made where every player has to logon to Battle.net (even if they are essentially going to be playing on their own). I understand the reasons why (to prevent cheating, reducing piracy, etc), but in that case, more so it means hardening the entire login to character creation process so that it can at least gracefully handle load related problems (by graceful, I dont mean throwing up nonsensical error codes).
What appalled me though was the overreaction by some gamers to these issues. A total lack of perspective. Yes, we bought the game and should therefore be able to play it immediately once it goes live. Yes, it isn’t a cheap game by any stretch of the imagination for some, but wholly geez, the amount of whining and complaining on Blizzard’s forums, fan sites, Facebook, and Twitter, went way over the top. It says quite a bit about the kind of instant gratification/sense of entitlement society which we now live in. I’m not saying that Blizzard could have managed the roll out better and should be given a free pass (give them at least a 72 hour period to rectify the issues – if they don’t, then by all means – skewer their decision for this design architecture), but it isn’t like they weren’t sitting back doing nothing as each region came online, and experienced issues. They obviously had some contingency plans including having system/network engineers along with software programmers working around the clock to address the issues and apply hot fixes.
With such a highly anticipated game as this (especially one that comes over a decade after the previous version), patience and perspective would go a long way. Not being able to play a game for a few hours/for one day isn’t going to kill anyone…