Diablo 3 Woes - [updated]

Ah, so this is what the game looks like!

So, as a part of the Annual Pass for World of Warcraft, I got Diablo 3.  Knowing it was going to be a mess when it launched and being keenly aware of it's "always online" Digital Rights Management (DRM) I decided to wait a few days for things to steady down before I downloaded, installed and played the game.

I must say, hell has definitely come and it's not the demonic horde of the game. It's the fact that I cannot stay connected to the servers in a SINGLE PLAYER GAME! I think to date I've been able to kill four monsters and in that time I've been disconnected two times.  The first time locking up my computer.

I don't know what Blizzard is hoping to do but apparently it has a lot to do with their Real Money Auction House. I guess they are hoping it will be a recurring source of income for them.  I'm to assume that if it's successful then it'll probably rear it's ugly head over on World of Warcraft. Also, I'm pretty certain that a lot of it has to do with them trying to prevent piracy and, maybe, cheaters.

Here's the thing. Here is why I hate DRM and this is a perfect example of it. You see, it'll be a matter of time before this game is "cracked" if it isn't already. So, those who pirate the game will have a better product than those of us who obtained the game "legally". The ability to actually play the game, when ever I want, would actually be a feature I'd really like.  You know, pay money for.



Well, I guess it's up to an indie developer to make a similar, but superior, product and release it on us waiting masses.  Who knows, they might be able to make a living doing so.

Update - Last night, on the Diablo forum, I read that entering "general chat" would make the disconnect problems go away.

So I tried it.

It worked. I did not have any problem with disconnects for the remainder of the evening.  This bugs me though. I don't want to play the multiplayer Diablo and I certainly don't want to be hooked up to any public general chat.

As a matter of a fact the whole reason why I leave general chat in World of Warcraft reared it's ugly head when I was playing; the stupid inane chatter that has nothing to do with the game. I hate trying to read the dialog of the game between bouts of "trolololololo", "herpaderp" and the gold farmer spam I got. Okay, it was only one spam message but it was one too many!