This is pretty bad. The entire country can’t play right now.
This has been out for almost 48 hours, and the connectivity problems appear to be worse, not better.
I just lost all of my progress in the Weeping Forest. What a pain. I’ve played that like 4 times already!
It is my understanding that the Asian servers are up and running, but I have no idea how to connect to those.
Fuck Blizzard and their DRM fears.
I have had none of the connection problems everyone gripes about. The current server outage is the first one to effect me and I’ve probably got 9hrs in the game so far. I wonder why some people can and some people can’t connect?
Additionally, go check out the official forums and read people frothing at the mouth over the outages. People who have characters level 40+ already complaining that they have been ripped off because they haven’t been able to play constantly. Hasn’t it been out like 36 hours and you’re already level 40?? That’s ALOT of play time.
I’m not sure if I like or dislike having a clock on the screen.
it can be turned off. i’m not sure i will like knowing exactly how much time i have spent on the game.
Hell, my computer has said “Updating setup files” for the past 12 hours. Haven’t even seen the game. Now that’s a gripe. 
So my main gripe is that the game is so ridiculously easy that it’s not even really a game in the sense of being a challenge. It’s like running through a starter zone in an MMO at level 30… you just run around and one shot everything, and nothing can hurt you. You don’t need to think about positioning or what skills to use - you pretty much can’t die and you could close your eyes and randomly click around the screen and win.
Hopefully it’ll be more interesting on later difficulty levels, but it sucks that you have to go through this training wheels mode on every character for long times just to get to that point.
My concern is that it goes from impossible to fail easy mode to punishingly and arbitrarily hard too quickly, not leaving much room in there for good, challenging gameplay.
At least there’s no facebook connect button! 
How far are you? I found there to be a bit of a bump in difficulty from Act I to II, but that was pretty much it for Normal.
I’m towards the end of Act I in Nightmare now, and the only big change has been the the rare/champions. They get multiple effects and can be quite brutal depending on what they are. I’d say I die about a third of the time when one of those shows up. I haven’t found the bosses or regular enemies to be any threat, though.
Well my primary gripe is that I had to wait all day at work to get home and install it, only to find that my operating system is outdated. One Windows Service Pack later, and it is sloooowly installing. I’m not crazy about having to be online to play it either, because I only have a USB broadband adapter internet connection, and my wife and I are always fighting over gets to use the internet 
At least with Starcraft 2 you only needed the internet connection to play online and register achievements :mad: Why the eff do I need to constantly be online for a single player game? More of a widespread gripe really.
My biggest complaint is that my harddrive died on the day it came out.
And its a warranty job so I probably wont be able to even install it till Monday at the earliest.
Otara
“More dumb” is not relative to individuals, no. Can you explain to me why you think it is?
No it’s not. In higher difficulties, many sets of six skills will get you killed. You’re going to need to change your build. This means you made a mistake.
That said, though they call them “builds” on the D3 forums, I actually think the word “build” should be dropped. We don’t really have builds anymore. We have configurations. And it is possible to create a bad configuration in D3, just as it was possible to create a bad build in D2.
D2 had an OOPS button as well. In D2, the OOPS button was the called “create new character.” In D3, the OOPS buttons are the skill UI buttons. So in regards to having OOPS buttons, D2 and D3 are no different.
“Question” here had the sense “matter under discussion.” It’s a fairly common usage–I didn’t mean to confuse. My apologies.
So I guess you’re still in Act I. In Act II there is a mini boss and there are boss minions which one-shot you. It is basically impossible not to get killed by these guys at least once unless you’re very lucky. And once you get killed, you realize to avoid doing so in the future you’re going t ohave to think more tactically.
I’m not saying they’re the only thing presnting a challenge in Act II, but just showing that there is at least one challenge.
Wait, what? I don’t remember anything like that.
[QUOTE=Frylock]
I’m not saying they’re the only thing presnting a challenge in Act II, but just showing that there is at least one challenge.
[/QUOTE]
I guess it depends on the class you are playing. Or you guys are god like gamers. I’ve had several close calls (and I’m still on act II at this point) where death could have happened had I not tossed down some caltrops and popped a heal potion. It seems about the same level of difficulty to me as Diablo II on the first play through…which also depended on class for how easy or hard it was. I remember playing my Amazon through with no problems, but my Necro seemed to die a lot on that first play through. Later on, it was the Amazon who struggled but the Necro got so powerful that he wasn’t having much trouble with even the level bosses.
Most of my gripes from the first night have faded away. Played last night with no issues, and am starting to get the skill system a bit more and grasp how you can customize it with runes and such to make a character exactly like what you want. I also started playing with the crafting system, which seems pretty cool as well (wonder if you get a heradric cube later on to do the gem thingy?). All in all I had a lot of fun last night, and I’m happy with the game. Haven’t tried multi-player yet…will probably wait until my second play through and the hook up with some friends.
-XT
The boss minions accompanying Maeghda, and a miniboss that comes shortly before her. They wield these crude metal pole-arms, and if they hit you with them using a particular attack, if you’re a wizard with 750 hp (I forget how much armor) they will kill you in one shot.
I agree with Cubsfan. ‘Dumbed down’ is subjective; a matter of opinion. Your opinion is not ‘correct’ any more than his is. So, chill out.
And so far, I haven’t had to make a single choice in building my character since class and gender. The infinitely swappable skills mean that there’s no value in making a second character of the same class. I would definitely call it ‘dumbed down’, or perhaps ‘streamlined’ if you prefer. ‘Simplified’ would also apply. There’s no real consequence to your choices - sure, bringing a bad loadout might get you killed once , but what does that matter in this game? In D2, you had to think about your skill choices - and bringing a bad loadout might mean you couldn’t progress at all past a certain fight until you figured out a creative strategy or equipment load to take care of it.
Some people might be happy that you can no longer get stuck like that, and all your characters run like beefed-up League of Legends heroes. I think it makes the game less immersive - my character’s not a character, he’s a mannequin that can wear whatever hat he needs to beat the monsters. Honestly, if you’re not going to make skill choices permanent, why make the class choice permanent? Let people change classes with a one-minute cooldown on all abilities. Then they would never need more than one character.
I have some of the same issues with D3 (compared to D2) as I did with 4th Edition D&D compared to 3rd - it’s less immersive and less fun. I’m not saying it’s a bad game, but if they patched D2’s graphics and made it run in widescreen, I’d probably play that instead.
Or not necessarily god-like, but very experienced. If you’d dropped me into DIII before I’d spent several years in MMOs, I would have been mulch by the end of the second dungeon… now, not only am I familiar with such things as “how to move” (laugh all you want, but you weren’t born knowing it either) but I also know that Ms Big Bones is supposed to plunge straight into fights whereas a mage is “a glass gun”.
With my sorc/wizard/whatever, I’ve been burning through heal potions and have died several times (and Chronos and I took about six tries to kill the Act I final boss). This is probably partially because I was running a bit ahead of the curve on level vs. plot (having joined someone else’s game and then just kept going), and partially because I’m not much of a player (I know for a fact that I should be using my frost nova more often).
I will say that it’s kind of annoying that you can’t just set a difficulty level so that leet dudes like Snr. Beef can have fun whilst terribad gamers like me can as well.
Thing is, there’s nothing stopping you from playing this way still. Just decide that you’re going to forgo switching skills once you’ve chosen them, or limit yourself to changing a single skill per level or something, and hey presto, you’ve got D2 again.
In D2, IIRC, I tended to use only a few skills over and over, probably not more than 4. (I could be wrong–it’s been many, many years since I played it). I didn’t read build-guides, so my builds weren’t optimized; they were just what I thought might be cool. I remember going through about 50 deaths trying to kill some act boss with my frost-arrow amazon, and finally reading online that this boss was like 95% immune to cold damage. Oops! I still didn’t really have much tactical flexibility with the fight, though, since I’d made the strategic choice to sink all my points into frost arrows. I just had to plug through it.
D3 isn’t strategic like that. There’s no point to reading build guides, I’d think. Instead, it’s tactical. For each fight you customize your character, within the class limits, to be optimized for that fight. This is far more flexible than D2 (although it’s pretty close to the flexibility of D1).
Granted, I’m playing a wizard, and it sounds like maybe some of the other classes aren’t quite as tactical as the wizard is; I dunno. I do know that I’m constantly adjusting my skills, far more than I ever did in D2. Because it’s requiring constant thought rather than just thought at leveling up, I think the game’s thinkier, not less thinky, than D2
If I have a gripe, it’s this: I’d like some more crunchy information about what the different skills and runes do. What’s the range on my enchanted blades, and how much damage do they do? By how much does this particular rune increase the freeze time for frost nova? That sort of thing.
I’m not saying I’m leet. I’m saying no one could fail, even people who can’t figure out which one is the keyboard and which one is the mouse, at least as far as act 1 normal. I’ve only played coop, so maybe it’s more difficult in single player, but I doubt it - sometimes I end up going off on my own in coop down one tunnel while my friends clear another one - so I’m alone fighting enemies that are boosted to 300%+ strength, and yet even then I generally have no problem facerolling through it. The one time I had trouble was when I activated one of those quests/mini events while doing this and had to face the entire encounter alone with the whole thing boosted 3x.