Complaints, gripes, kvetches...

[Paelos]

So Euro servers aren't up? Or they are just crashing in primetime?

I went to the site and it said they are all up. I'm lost.

"We are investigating an issue with the Battle.net servers during that time all game services will be down"

So they are down right now? It says Asia is down on the site.

[Xanthippe]

Well, thanks and howdy to all the American people who've friended me on the American Servers.

But I'm only here because the Euro servers are once again ass cuntingly down.

US servers > Euro servers. You should stay. All the kool kids are here.

[Jeff Kelly]

They went up again at 1:30 local time but people have massive lag and sometimes even pauses for 2 or 3 seconds and much rubberbanding.

[Ratman_tf]

Now it's on by default and comes back on every time you login. 

Blizzard's strategy to fix the servers is to chase off all the damn people. 

[Cheddar]

Got the itch.  Logged in.  Lagged.  Alt + f4.

Am I really the only one in the US having this issue?  How the hell are you people playing?

[kildorn]

Lagged once, or lagged constantly?

I've been lag free tonight, but I haven't been on in about an hour.

[Paelos]

I played tonight lag free from 7EST until now.

[Malakili]

  The occasional spike or disconnect, but nothing which has prevented me from playing (although I am hesitant to start a HC character).  I played most of the evening tonight with 0 problems though.

[waffel]

Got bored of grinding my dick against the wall in Act 1 Inferno. Thankfully they added other things to do in this game other than grind. Man, I sure would be bored without PvP, or endless dungeons, or challenges, or all the different game modes they added to mix things up. 

[Rasix]

 

I'm going to have to slow down for a different reason.  Hello again, tennis elbow.  I've not missed you, but it seems you're back.  And angry.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Got bored of grinding my dick against the wall in Act 1 Inferno. Thankfully they added other things to do in this game other than grind. Man, I sure would be bored without PvP, or endless dungeons, or challenges, or all the different game modes they added to mix things up. 

Pretty much my feelings as well.

[Paelos]

Do yall play with other people? Because if you don't I can understand some of the frustration. If you do and still hate what's going on? I think you might just hate fun.

[ezrast]

After playing for a while my major complaint (aside from the universal interface & downtime complaints) is that much of the combat feels so limited in terms of what mechanics I can exploit. I'm a very control-oriented player but almost all the real battlefield-affecting skills are on 15 second CDs or longer. Since elite mobs get you in oh-shit situations way more often than once every 15 seconds, I feel forced to either make half my skill bar be defensive things that I'm just waiting for the mobs to force me to use, or have my entire battle strategy revolve around running awaaaaaaaay.

Just looking at wizard skills compared to D2 - Frost Nova lost its spamability, Blizzard doesn't stack and doesn't freeze, Teleport lost its spammability (okay, this one is probably justifiable), Charged Bolt (whatever it's called now) can't be amped up to fire 20 bolts at a time to cover half the screen. I tried making a Paralysis build but it procs waaay less than the 8% chance advertised; forum chatter confirmed that it's useless. All that's left to keep the character interesting is to try a high-crit build but I'm not sure with what since Critical Mass doesn't unlock for another 10 levels. Any random high-AP-cost thing along with AP return, I guess - but I have little faith that the listed AP return isn't going to be cut by 90% because I dared to try to maximize it's usefulness with an AoE ability.

My monk is in the same boat (with the exception of a wonky build I'll post in the monk thread later); all I can do in a typical non-near-death fight situation is spam my boring spirit builder and maybe keep up Exploding Palm because literally every single other skill either has a CD, is a knockback, is passive, or is utility of questionable usefulness. For all the options, there's just nothing to make the fight interesting in any situation where I'm not about to get my ass handed to me.

Monsters in a PvE game shouldn't have better CC than I do, is what I'm saying.

[Rokal]

Monsters in a PvE game shouldn't have better CC than I do, is what I'm saying.

Some of the monster combos in Hell + are just not fun to fight. Tonight I got a demonic tremor (the large Act 3 monsters with 2 big claws that periodically shield themselves and then enrage) with Shield, Waller, and Immunity. Nothing says 'fun' like enemies that are immune to damage for 95% of the fight and trap you in melee range for 100% of it so you can twiddle your thumbs and watch your health bar drop. After throwing my barbarian's corpse at them a few times in legitimate attempts to win, I suicided a few more times to kill the ballista and then moved on.

For large portions of act 2 and 3 Hell I feel like I need 3-4 defensive abilities to not instantly die vs some combos which just isn't very fun compared to the balanced mix of offense/defensive abilities I was using for NM. Looking at successful Inferno builds for barb, they're practically only using defensive abilities. No thanks.

A pretty fool-proof strategy for every boss in Hell also seems to be taking all the long-cooldown high-power barb attacks (earthquake, call of the ancients, wrath of the berserker), using them, and then kitting until they come off cooldown again. It's effective but no fun.

Most of my complaints about Diablo 3 thus far have been about non-gameplay problems: loot, the AH, the length/ambition of the campaign.  As of later Acts in Hell I'm just not having fun with the gameplay either, which seems to be a pretty accurate (and much faster/less grindy) preview of Inferno.

I don't think Diablo 2 was much different in this regard. Hell mobs were still cheap and you were shoe-horned into a few viable builds. The difference is that I had a ton of incentive to keep rolling new characters instead of farming Hell in Diablo 2, and that incentive isn't really there in Diablo 3 due to the loot and (overall good) skill changes. I'll probably stick it out for another 2 levels to get to 60 and finish Act 4 Hell, or maybe I'll just get a friend or two to help since pre-Inferno bringing more players makes things quite a bit easier. After that I think I'm done.

[Setanta]

I say this with love, but until Australia gets a stronger development community, you're probably going to get the short end of some sticks both on lag/downtime and pricing (for reasons I don't get).

I don't disagree with you at all. It's why I rate Valve over Blizzard (other than the fact that publishers using Steam often gouge Aussies). At least Steam files are cached on Aussie servers and we can play Valve games on Aussie servers.
Kind of sad that Team Fortress seems to be Australia's only real PC game (until the team moved to the US under Valve for TFC etc). I'm not going to admit that we were responsible for the abortion that was Tribes: Vengeance.

What I really would love to see is Aussie/NZ sheep-shaggers having a server cluster on our home soil. By now surely Blizzard could set up 2-3 WoW/SC2/D3 clusters for us to play on.

[Ironwood]

Except they wouldn't work.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Do yall play with other people? Because if you don't I can understand some of the frustration. If you do and still hate what's going on? I think you might just hate fun.

I do play with other people and all through nightmare I had a blast but as said above once you get past that it's all about taking every defensive talent and whittling away mob health bars and kiting. That's just not fun gameplay to me, no matter how many people I play with.

[Paelos]

If you're playing a Barb, I recommend getting a Demon Hunter friend, and/or some wizards. Ask Muffin, he'll tell you. HILARITY!

[Fabricated]

I tolerate the game with multiple people, but it's pretty much what Lakov talks about. A shitty elite pack rolls up on you, and you're just kiting shit around whittling away at it very slowly. Meh.

[Xanthippe]

I hit a wall on both WD and monk when I hit Hell level. The WD is still there, the monk I took to 60 since it was more fun. Monks have more built in damage mitigation so I didn't have to kite constantly. (WDs need some loving, I think. Mine's on the shelf for now.)

Still, I'd upgrade one piece of armor at a time from the AH, and get a little further. (Working on achievements helped avoid the boredom of farming). I had fun getting through Hell level.

I never expected to play Inferno level after hearing it described. It's not for me.

I'm doing fine in Act 1 as long as I avoid blue packs. If I don't outrun a blue pack, I'm dead. I might be able to progress with different gear but that remains to be seen as to whether I even want to continue in Inferno. It does rather feel like banging my head against a wall.

I do want to bring up other characters. DH or Wiz or Barb. I'll work on my WD when they tweak it enough that I find it fun, or if I learn to play it so that it is fun. It could well be my own lack of understanding/ability that is at fault here.

It's a lot more fun to play with other people than alone.

[Malakili]

I'm doing fine in Act 1 as long as I avoid blue packs. If I don't outrun a blue pack, I'm dead. I might be able to progress with different gear but that remains to be seen as to whether I even want to continue in Inferno. It does rather feel like banging my head against a wall.

If you want to try, start collecting gear with + all resist on it until you've got 200-250 resist all, helps enormously.

[Xanthippe]

I'm doing fine in Act 1 as long as I avoid blue packs. If I don't outrun a blue pack, I'm dead. I might be able to progress with different gear but that remains to be seen as to whether I even want to continue in Inferno. It does rather feel like banging my head against a wall.

If you want to try, start collecting gear with + all resist on it until you've got 200-250 resist all, helps enormously.

Monks have this cool ability that makes one resistant to everything equivalent to one's highest resists. So I've been stacking fire resistance gear, and I think I'm up to 175 or something. Upgrading at 1mil apiece is still out of my price range, but I do intend to do it.

I'm having fun completing achievements in hell level and cutting through that crap like buttah after remembering my struggle with those mobs. Even blue packs go down fast there now.

Isn't everybody looking for +all resist gear? +Fire resist is expensive enough, I imagine +all resist must be insanely priced.

[Raknor]

I haven't found resist all gear being overly expensive if you're willing to spend a little while searching the AH.  I usually set a pretty tight filter for what I'm looking for and hit refresh a few times while I'm around the house.  Fri-Sun I usually get some amazing deals. As with anything worth a damn on the AH it sells quick so don't take too long to weigh your options.

At the end of the evening I also expand the filter into more expensive stuff an look for people with low buyouts and little time remaining.  Got two pieces of +56 resist all gear last night for 50k when they had buy outs of 350.  Both had around 3 to 4 hours left on them when I went to bed. Worst that could happen is that I got my money back in the morning.

[Lakov_Sanite]

getting more int-oriented pieces might help with resists and be cheaper in general.

[statisticalfool]

1 pt of Resist All is worth 10 points of int, so if you're not scaling off int, then resist all is much better.

[Jeff Kelly]

Do yall play with other people? Because if you don't I can understand some of the frustration. If you do and still hate what's going on? I think you might just hate fun.

It's a single player game for frak's sake! It shouldn't have login screens or lag or disconnects or downtimes and you shouldn't need friends or random players to enjoy it!

At least with other franchises the multiplayer is an add on you can simply ignore...

Paelos it's nice that you like the game as is but please don't evangelize. It's Diablo it should be a single player game first  and multiplayer a distant second or it should have been multiplayer all the way.

Right now it's both but neither the first or the second aspect really work.

[Paelos]

Who is evangelizing? I ask questions and suggest ways to improve things if you're not having as much fun.

In the same way, I think you are determined to hate the game because it's online. If that's the case, ok, but we knew about this for a long time. Obviously, if the servers in Europe are down and you can't play the game, you should ask for your money back, return the product, and let Blizzard know why.

Also, is there a problem with European people playing with American versions of the game? I've read something about this recently.

[Merusk]

The problem is your characters - and more importantly - gold and stash don't transfer between the two.

Issue: still amusing. 

[Maledict]

The EU servers are, yet again, down for the second time in two days at prime time. If it's like last night, they will be down the entire night.

Two weeks after launch.

This is actually *worse* that when they launched WoW - 7 years ago.

Totally and utterly unacceptable at this point. Ridiculously so.

[Paelos]

It appears it's a login server problem, not a game server problem. That makes it all the more dumb.

[Amaron]

It appears it's a login server problem, not a game server problem. That makes it all the more dumb.

Agreed.  Login server should be fairly standard plug and play software for them by now.

[Paelos]

I also find it hilarious that the login server is bogging down like crazy because people are trying to get through the EULA.   

[Ingmar]

It's Diablo it should be a single player game first

It never has been before. Maybe Diablo 1, but multiplayer through battle.net was *definitely* Blizzard's focus with D2.

[Ironwood]

Horseshit.

[Thrawn]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/8/8/sound-and-fury/