Sirian's Day One of Diablo 3

[Sirian]

Sirian's Day One of Diablo 3


So my day began at 1AM Eastern. (Why? Long story. Coincidence regarding Diablo, though, not planned.) Launch is set for 3 AM. I showered, ate breakfast (leftovers), then toyed around with some other stuff until 3:15. I then spent a half-hour typing and retyping my password endlessly, because Blizz said, "If you get error 37, you really should keep trying. It's just busy." Oh yeah? Well after 20 mins of patient retyping, I started to get a little miffed. At 30 mins I stopped for half an hour and played WoW, running archaeology on a minor toon. During that 30 minutes, I actually got logged in three times. But every interaction with the server was an opportunity to time out and have to start over. 1. Login. 2. Receiving your (non existant) Heroes List. 3. Creating your first Hero. 4. Launching a game. At least four chances in the process to time out, and every step along the way, you had to win the Login Lottery to proceed. I got to step 2 three times. My next try, at 4:15, I never got past step 1. Three minutes of that and I got up and took a stretch break. Finally at 4:30 Eastern, I got logged in.


From there it's not so bad. I created Ember first... but then timed out. I tried again, and got timed out and got the boot off the server. I log back in and there are-- two Embers. Identical name, multiple wizards. I deleted one and moved on to making my Monk, which I played for the next three hours.
Starting with the two melee classes. Monk solo, Barbarian coop with my wife's Wizard. She was still sleeping, so the Monk first.

I am quite fond of the Monk's second main ability, which is a medium range mental punch of some kind, which can hit multiple targets and you don't have to be in their melee range. This is a fun ability, at least to me. I also like the roundhouse kick secondary ability. However, I only got to play to and through the Skeleton King by the time my wife woke up (at 7) and had her shower and breakfast, and was then ready to play. I get asked if we are doing coop or should she make her solo toon first. This was a trap. There was a wrong answer to this question. Nothing sinister or mischievous, just one answer makes wife glow and giggle, and the other makes her go all quiet and frowny. So... coop it is.

Now when we played together briefly during the beta, she was purposely dropping chandeliers on my head in the Cathedral. (This doesn't hurt your character). I remembered that, and I artfully dropped a couple on her today, in retaliation. This led to much giggling.

The prize moment came when we got past the Skeleton King to content that was new to us. The first oversize enemies in the game gave her quite a startle. They popped up when neither of us was expecting it and it was like someone jumped out of the shadows and shouted boo at her. I laughed so hard, and she was slightly embarassed by the whole thing, which led to me teasing her about it occasionally over the next couple of hours. I will have to stop before it gets too old, but I got a lot of mileage out of it already.

Oh and my first death came about in a strange way. My cat was rattling the door handle to the office, wanting in. I got up for about ten seconds to open the door, but apparently chose the worst possible timing. A boss mob from off screen charged at me. My wife is yelling to get back to the keyboard. "You're dying!" Then I was dead. ... THEN I got back to the keyboard. I think I ran in to one of the most lethal boss race/ability combos possible. It was so funny. Ten seconds of real life distraction when I looked perfectly safe in a quiet hallway. You wouldn't believe it if it weren't true, because it sounds pretty silly. (Most of Act 1 isn't terribly lethal.)

Things are pretty smooth for coop play.

I am going to try to limit my friends list for the moment. It seems that friends have pretty wide open permissions when it comes to joining your games. This seems like a good thing, assuming the people on your list are all pretty close to you. But it makes me wonder if it wouldn't be nice to have an Acquaintances List -- a middle ground between this and no contact. Just a thought. I don't know the full details on how everything works yet.

There is a lot more I could say, but I am making this a spoiler-free report, so I will stop here.


- Sirian

[Roland]

I am going to try to limit my friends list for the moment. It seems that friends have pretty wide open permissions when it comes to joining your games. This seems like a good thing, assuming the people on your list are all pretty close to you. But it makes me wonder if it wouldn't be nice to have an Acquaintances List -- a middle ground between this and no contact. Just a thought. I don't know the full details on how everything works yet.

There's three options: completely open, open to Friends only, and open via invitation only. It's not perfect for what you're looking for, but it works reasonably well. If you set it to invitation only (i.e. no Quickjoin) you don't have to limit your Friends list. Just my thoughts.

I concur that opening was... difficult, especially since I was still on the Starter Edition so when I finally DID get in all the lovely company of the Basin was unavailable to me. Plus, they all split off into groups, and so the chat died down drastically, too (which was what made the login attempts not only bearable, but humorous).

Since I've gotten my CE and can play the full game, I must say it's been quite a fun experience. I'm learning to use and enjoy skills I never used much in Beta (namely Impale), and just slowly working my way through the game (just hit Act II; Act I seems larger in D3 than D2, but that may be fault memory on my part). I will say this: the Act I end boss is damn hard. You almost certainly will die (I died twice). Not hard once you know the pattern, but it's virtually impossible to avoid taking heavy damage, and for a squishy DH you only last a few seconds in that situation. Just words of warning for any HC characters.

[Mavfin]

My comment on the whole launch/servers thing is that I tried at 2 AM, was timing out, so I catnapped for ~90 minutes and got right in. No frustration or waiting.

The server won't get hit like that again, anyway, not all at once, unless someone wants to mention an expansion X years down the road.

[ClamsAreHot]

"I get asked if we are doing coop or should she make her solo toon first. This was a trap. There was a wrong answer to this question. Nothing sinister or mischievous, just one answer makes wife glow and giggle, and the other makes her go all quiet and frowny. So... coop it is."

Men ought not live like this. A healthy relationship has the man in charge and the woman submissive. It isn't the man's responsibility to adhere to the wife's every selfish whim, especially since women are more emotional and fickle than men, and less rational. A man leads, a woman follows. A man who lets a woman lead him, and is afraid to challenge her, ought to be ashamed, especially if there are children involved who will witness this dysfunctional and unhealthy behavior, which will negatively impact their own relationships in the future.

Here's a good article on the topic, from a woman named Laura Grace Robins: http://fullofgraceseasonedwithsalt.blogs...do-to.html

"In this post, I suggest that obedience leads to perfection; in this case, a perfect marriage. The problem with modern women is they have no conception of obedience or submission, unless its their career. Maybe they would understand it more if you said, 'submit to your husband as you do to your career'. Women have no ideal how much submitting and obeying they really do."

And from the comments, the women talk about how most of the time the man is right and the woman is wrong in a relationship:

"My daughter, one of the happiest wives I know, told me how it works for her. Theirs was a mature marriage, so when a decision has to be made. they discuss it, and in MOST CASES, they promptly agree.
Once in a while, they do not agree, and she stops the discussion by saying, 'You are the head of this house, and we don't agree, so we are doing it your way, period.'
She is a scientist (Master's in Sci Ed) and she has observed that when she does it his way, MOST OF THE TIME HE WAS RIGHT AND SHE WAS WRONG. His male brain spotted something she missed.
Once in a while, he was wrong, but she has noticed also that almost always the rare case he was wrong, the cost was trivial.
And, she says, 'In exchange for this, I have peace in my house.'"

And Laura's response:

"Yes! I have experienced that too. Women are generally too emotional of thinkers and they rush into things without thinking. In fact, sometimes I even do posts before I clearly think them out and then sometimes regret them."

[NuurAbSaal]

...

I honestly can't tell if trolling or not. This is not to your credit, in my book. Not to mine either though.

Please go away.

take care
Tarabulus

[Sirian]

Day Two

Finish Act 1 on solo toon. Arrive in Act 2. Check out the starting area. Step outside the gate-- wife wakes up early. "Let's play together!"

Arrive back in Act 1 on coop toon.

.
.
.

I have ended up trying out the new skills as they appear, despite my affection for the existing skills. I've pretty much ended up moving to Frenzy for the barb. Loving the AoE stun with pull-them-to-me glyph. Combine with the 2min cooldown AoE fire spell and serious deeps emerges. Also forgoing WW (so far) in favor of the shockwave with stun glyph. ... Likey dat stunny, honey.

Monk also moved to the sweeping AoE skill. The frenzy-style skill at the end of the mouse-main-button group looks like a better boss killer, but sweep for everything else maybe. Not sure yet. Locked glyphs may change my mind. We'll see. Monk's charge skill good for moving THROUGH mobs in some cases (potential uses for escape as well as back-line-target pinning). Also handy in some cases for extending streaks.

Speaking of streaks... simple little mechanic, but tactically quite fun. Not sure if I will still be enamored with it in two months, but at least for now, loving it. More so solo, as coop you "compete" for streaks instead of combining, so it's not as immersive (or easy) there.

.
.

Died again. Again from dopey something.

So it went like this. Played through a good bit of Act 2 coop. Broke for family chiropractic appointment and lunch out. Returned home, fire up game, start with Entering the Palace event... MAJOR "load lag" for both my wife and I, dead (both of us) without even being able to defend ourselves at all.

Ridiculous. I would have thought they'd have avoided this problem, since it existed in Diablo 1. But no. MAJOR threat to anybody's hardcore characters.

Mind you, my hard drive is defragmented. 0%. It's not a slow, lumbering thing. My machine is my work machine (as a game dev), and it's loaded up with 12GB of fast RAM. Runs World of Warcraft on Ultra max at high framerates. It's no slouch. Yet I get enough hard drive graphics load lag to KILL ME OUTRIGHT? ... Blizz gets an F grade in this area. FAIL. Wiped on the lag boss. Terrible performance. This simply should not happen.

Moral of the story: Never, ever engage a boss fight as the first act of a new gaming session. Ever. Go out and fight some mobs. Use all your abilities. Get the game to load up all its graphics, or as many of them as you can. Because, you know, hey. Once they are loaded, it runs fine. You just don't want it lagging you in the worst way at the most lethal moments.

Lethal hard drive load lag on a powerhouse PC? Bad Blizz. BAD!


Oh and today something else noteworthy happened. "EEK A MOB, Part Two: Revenge of Sirian's Wife" hit theaters. Starring yours truly in the lead role. Opening scene, inconspiculous pit in the middle of a musty cellar. Out pops huge @$$ worm and swallows barbarian whole. Player goes EEK and is startled. Wife rolls on floor laughing at the irony of it. Credits roll.


- Sirian

[Bolty]

Mind you, my hard drive is defragmented. 0%. It's not a slow, lumbering thing. My machine is my work machine (as a game dev), and it's loaded up with 12GB of fast RAM. Runs World of Warcraft on Ultra max at high framerates. It's no slouch. Yet I get enough hard drive graphics load lag to KILL ME OUTRIGHT?

I'm a bit surprised you'd have a machine with those specs/abilities, without an SSD to go along with it. I can't recommend an SSD enough; once you have one as your primary drive and game on it, you simply can't go back again. You'll see a much larger performance boost than anything else on your machine just by picking up an SSD.

[Lissa]

Mind you, my hard drive is defragmented. 0%. It's not a slow, lumbering thing. My machine is my work machine (as a game dev), and it's loaded up with 12GB of fast RAM. Runs World of Warcraft on Ultra max at high framerates. It's no slouch. Yet I get enough hard drive graphics load lag to KILL ME OUTRIGHT?

I'm a bit surprised you'd have a machine with those specs/abilities, without an SSD to go along with it. I can't recommend an SSD enough; once you have one as your primary drive and game on it, you simply can't go back again. You'll see a much larger performance boost than anything else on your machine just by picking up an SSD.

That's not completely true, it depends on the game. If the game is having to swap in a lot of textures and has to call on the mass storage a lot (be it an SSD or a spindle drive) then an SSD makes sense to game off of. If the game can load all the textures into memory and only has to go to the mass storage occasionally, then it doesn't matter (you'll take a little longer on "cutscene", but nothing huge normally).

Where SSDs truly shine is when loading your O/S. My system goes from turn on to Windows log on screen in about 12 seconds (7 of that is the POST, with only a single Windows 7 loading animation before I'm lookin at the log in screen and desktop is instant when I enter the password and hit enter).

[Kevin]

I'm a bit surprised you'd have a machine with those specs/abilities, without an SSD to go along with it. I can't recommend an SSD enough; once you have one as your primary drive and game on it, you simply can't go back again. You'll see a much larger performance boost than anything else on your machine just by picking up an SSD.

This. Though some games I still put on my mechanical drive (which actually does quite well for a spindle based drive) but yes, I still can't get over how much it impacts performance (and boot times, I can literally do a restart in Win7 in under 20 seconds, that's a log out, shutdown, restart, login).

That being said I notice a lot more rubber banding and little lag things in the first 15 minutes of play in D3 than I do later on in sessions, even with it living on an SSD, I do think it's load/caching lag which is silly. It's not been bad enough to stop my hardcore progression (of course I'm only 18, but I'm seeing content for the first time hardcore, not softcore) but I've debated a few times.

[Lissa]

I'm a bit surprised you'd have a machine with those specs/abilities, without an SSD to go along with it. I can't recommend an SSD enough; once you have one as your primary drive and game on it, you simply can't go back again. You'll see a much larger performance boost than anything else on your machine just by picking up an SSD.

This. Though some games I still put on my mechanical drive (which actually does quite well for a spindle based drive) but yes, I still can't get over how much it impacts performance (and boot times, I can literally do a restart in Win7 in under 20 seconds, that's a log out, shutdown, restart, login).

That being said I notice a lot more rubber banding and little lag things in the first 15 minutes of play in D3 than I do later on in sessions, even with it living on an SSD, I do think it's load/caching lag which is silly. It's not been bad enough to stop my hardcore progression (of course I'm only 18, but I'm seeing content for the first time hardcore, not softcore) but I've debated a few times.

No, that rubber banding isn't caching it's from the network. I was chatting with TD and Quark last night on mumble and we were seeing occasional times where it was affecting all of us. That's definitely not a caching issue, but issues with Blizzard's servers. You got to realize that Blizzard is using UDP here and if packets get dropped in transmission from you to the server, the server is going to rubber band you back to where it shows you should be before you sent all those UDP packets that didn't reach the server.

[Kevin]

No, that rubber banding isn't caching it's from the network. I was chatting with TD and Quark last night on mumble and we were seeing occasional times where it was affecting all of us. That's definitely not a caching issue, but issues with Blizzard's servers. You got to realize that Blizzard is using UDP here and if packets get dropped in transmission from you to the server, the server is going to rubber band you back to where it shows you should be before you sent all those UDP packets that didn't reach the server.

That's what I thought too but I've only seen it early in play sessions, and actually I've always seen it early in play session which made me change my theory from network/server to something local. I've had it happen in coop while on mumble with someone and they didn't see it (which I know is still very possible with network since we're coming from different locations).

Like I said what gets me is that I don't see it at all after a play session gets over 30 minutes minutes and I've seen it in the first 5 minutes of every play session. That just doesn't jive with it only being caused by network issues. Small sample size and all of course, but it just seems to follow a pattern for me that doesn't make sense.

[Mavfin]

Like I said what gets me is that I don't see it at all after a play session gets over 30 minutes minutes and I've seen it in the first 5 minutes of every play session. That just doesn't jive with it only being caused by network issues. Small sample size and all of course, but it just seems to follow a pattern for me that doesn't make sense.

And I simply almost never see it at all. So there's a third differing look.

[LochnarITB]

Rather than starting a new thread, I'll add to this one.

Does anyone else feel like the toon is too high on the screen? It seems to me that the toon is centered between the top and bottom halves of the screen where other games have the toon maybe a third of the way down into the bottom half. One thing that it affects is having less time to react to things since that is generally the way I am traveling. More so, it makes it harder for me to play extended sessions. My neck and back bind up. Perhaps it is just old eyes trying to look through a lower part of my lenses, but I'm OK on other games. That is seriously going to mess with my enjoyment of the game.

And, just to add to a point already touched on - The rubberbanding I see doesn't happen real often but, when I do see it, it stutters easily 10-20 times and looks like a looped video. Then it's gone again.

[Treesh]

Rather than starting a new thread, I'll add to this one.

Does anyone else feel like the toon is too high on the screen? It seems to me that the toon is centered between the top and bottom halves of the screen where other games have the toon maybe a third of the way down into the bottom half. One thing that it affects is having less time to react to things since that is generally the way I am traveling. More so, it makes it harder for me to play extended sessions. My neck and back bind up. Perhaps it is just old eyes trying to look through a lower part of my lenses, but I'm OK on other games. That is seriously going to mess with my enjoyment of the game.

And, just to add to a point already touched on - The rubberbanding I see doesn't happen real often but, when I do see it, it stutters easily 10-20 times and looks like a looped video. Then it's gone again.

It does seem to me to be dead center, but that's ok because I move around a lot and am just as likely to have enemies behind me as in front of me. I keep expecting to hear "They came from... behind!" Maybe I just like to be surrounded.

[smegged]

Sirian's first few experiences with it have been vastly better than Smegged's first few experiences with it. I'm a sufferer of the dreaded Error 3007 problems. I have only just gotten to the spider caverny bit in act 1 (seriously though this feels exactly like the spider cavern from act 3 in d2).