Diablo III's Launch Is Crippled By Error 37

Now I don’t know how much of a problem this log-in issue presented to those who tried to play the game they just bought (my order was cancelled, due to the store not having enough CEs available all of a sudden), and I haven’t visited Reddit either to gauge the “severity” of this incident, but I truly hope that someone at Activision/Blizzard noticed how silly this is. I would go as far as to say that this is almost unacceptable, for what many people might still regard as a single-player game (maybe I’m old), to not be able to play a game that they’ve just bought. (And I’m even going into the discussion of digital download buyers having to wait until the box-buyers had theirs on “launch day”.)

I’m not as naive as to think that this situation will make Activision/Blizzard “change their ways” or anything, and I guess some will just chalk this post up to typical “gamer entitlement”, but my point is that this issue, regardless if it was “serious” or just a minor inconvenience, was completely unnecessary. Even Steam (love it or hate it) has an Offline-mode (that I’ve read may or may not work, go figure), and Blizzard could have implemented something similar.

–Oh but then the real money action house might be vulnerable to hacks, etc.

Well, without going into the topic of the benefits or down sides to such an implementation of the aucion house, I would argue that this issue was solved as far back as in Diablo 1. Designated single-player characters could not be used in multiplayer games, and vice versa. Something slightly similar was in Diablo 2, when we had Battle.net and our characters were store in “the cloud” (before we had that term), with slightly more security put in place against cheating and character manipulation. Singleplayer/LAN-characters could not be used on Battle.net (remember LAN, anyone?). Something similar could “easily” have been implemented in Diablo 3.

I’m not blind to the fact that this might have been confusing to more inexperienced gamers, not being able to play with their friends with the character they made (in single-player mode), etc., and maybe this is the reason why they did not do it like I’ve suggested. I’m sure they could have made some kind of warning during character creation about this difference between an “offline” and “online” character.

I haven’t really researched everything concerning this issue, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who has thought of this. I still wanted to make my voice heard, at least here on Gamebreaker.tv and its community. All thoughts can’t be original. But thanks for bringing this news to my attention, and keep on the good work giving us MMO and general gaming news.

In my mind it is like patronizing a restaurant where a 60$ dollar steak dinner will come to you “eventually” if at all. I don’t really care that i cannot play the game tonight. I know i will be able to at some point. What really sweats my jets is the fact something i have bought and paid for is not really mine.

I made a little vid about this error! Still, the game is awesome. Just felt right to make this video! 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKziJg_z5Ic&feature=g-u-u

Wow negativity, there is a specific reason it’s online and even though I travel and won’t be able to access the game for long periods of time due to the connected requirement and that has to do with hacks and of course the RMAH as well.  I love how so many people were angry that a digital product is not there’s, guess what no game you have ever purchased was “yours” all licences still belong to the company, that’s why years down the road when roms and emulators come out it’s technically very illegal to have them at least for 75 years after the product comes out anyway

I got kicked off multiple times and was sad when errors showed up at log in but you know what?  On the launch of D2 I wasn’t even able to play for 2 days until I found a work around to get it to run and I definitely was able to play D3 at launch on a all online server with millions of other people and I doubt many other games can claim they have millions of fans swarming there servers at launch, well other than COD.