The diablo situation is hilarious. And sad.
It's expected though coming from blizzard. Every single patch day in WoW is destroyed by wonky servers, full queues and so on and that's just patches which add content. Expansions are usually more of a clusterfuck.
The rule of thumb is give it about 1 week and you should be able to get back on whenever you want.
It is sad that people voted with their wallets for a title with such strict DRM. DRM that is stopping people from playing a single player game along with throwing them in a fucking queue for it.
I'm surprised there isn't a better solution. One that maybe checks every 30 minutes or so to see if you are "online" in the background which authenticates you along with allowing you to store save games and retrieve them whenever you want from whatever machine.
The entire, it saves your progress online is cool thing, is a little strange. I'm surprised blizzard (and others) don't offer cloud based storage for your account. Battle.net should be able to handle it, hell it's saving your location anyway, why not let me make a save of any point in time and upload that to my account? Then I can grab that along with say the 10 past ones whenever I feel like jumping straight into that spot on any machine.
As it looks like it, With diablo 3s success we are going to see that push to always online DRM. I can only hope someone comes up with a good solution for the consumer who wants to play online or offline with whatever title they sell.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens with titles over the next 6 - 12 months.
We've been discussing this on IRC. It's not single player. It's multi player (and by default friends can drop in and out as they please). If you want single player, you simply create your own solo instance of the multi player game.
What a terrible idea.
But you still need to be connected to the server right? Which still gives you a ping but is private.
