Skills can be modified at any time, all it does is incur a cooldown on any skill that gets modified (20 seconds or something?). Definitely shouldn't worry about skill choices, just find the ones you enjoy playing with.
Crafting, didn't get to play with that too much but it seemed pretty straightforward. You just pay gold to unlock levels... unless there is more to it (droppable patterns?).
Thanks, it makes me feel better knowing I am not potentially screwing myself by making a bad skill choice. There seems to be a lot of debate about builds etc, especially within the DH forum.
This thread seems indicate there are some Plans that you need to get separately from the ones you get by levelling your blacksmithing, I assume they are obtained via drop.
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so exactly what was that open beta stress test weekend for? was Blizzard really caught off guard by how popular D3 is? 8 years from the launch of WoW and they still haven't figured out how to properly manage their resources for game launches
Unless they're willing to way over-provision I think this'll always be the way of it with highly anticipated franchises. People taking days off work just to play on day 1, the load is going to be many many times what a "regular" load is. So either you just try and muck through it, or over-provision so you can handle 10 times your usual user load just so you don't get this for the first few days.
What bugs me is that you can't play single player in offline mode or anything like that.
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Found this little tip while on the D3 boards last night while I was waiting to play. I thought i'd share.
In the gameplay options in the ESC menu. If you x out the "elective mode" (turn it on) it allows you to put any skill in any hot key (either mouse buttons adn 1-4 as they unlock) rather then limiting you to certain slots for certain skill sets. They have it turned off for new players to get used to the skills is what they are saying.
Ugh the chat options are terrible, can't create chat channels and no where for people to "gather" per say. Hopefully they add them in, but you'd think they'd have learned as they had the exact same issue with SC2 until they patched it.
Not liking how linear the game is skill wise, but do enjoy the game play and the gold sinks so far!
This downtime probably could have been avoided if they had an offline version you could play. I know that's how I did the first two. Get a feel for the game before venturing online.
I know it makes it more difficult to curb piracy though.
Unless they're willing to way over-provision I think this'll always be the way of it with highly anticipated franchises. People taking days off work just to play on day 1, the load is going to be many many times what a "regular" load is. So either you just try and muck through it, or over-provision so you can handle 10 times your usual user load just so you don't get this for the first few days.
I totally understand this argument and I haven't been angry or anything like that. But with the way internet architecture is these days couldn't they have rented a whole swath of backup servers for a week? Or would the work involved in something like that not be cost effective? Everybody is talking as if they would have had to buy all of those servers and eat years of extra overhead, rather than a short period of lease fees. Is that really how it works?
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I totally understand this argument and I haven't been angry or anything like that. But with the way internet architecture is these days couldn't they have rented a whole swath of backup servers for a week? Or would the work involved in something like that not be cost effective? Everybody is talking as if they would have had to buy all of those servers and eat years of extra overhead, rather than a short period of lease fees. Is that really how it works?
You could lease equipment, but within the scope of such a specialized application and the set up required means that a short term solution would be expensive enough that it really wouldn't make much sense. It's not like a Battlefeild server where you can simply add X number slots for $10 each a month.
Really, the problem will be solved within a week or so just by the virtue that not everyone in the world will be trying to play at the exact same instant. I am not the least bit stressed about it.
Since it happens with every release, you would this these people who have taken the time off would understand this and held off on booking that time during the first week. We all know that wouldn't happen though.
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I totally understand this argument and I haven't been angry or anything like that. But with the way internet architecture is these days couldn't they have rented a whole swath of backup servers for a week? Or would the work involved in something like that not be cost effective? Everybody is talking as if they would have had to buy all of those servers and eat years of extra overhead, rather than a short period of lease fees. Is that really how it works?
Hard to say for sure without knowing what kind of hardware they need for how many players and how much effort they put into being able to auto-deploy new servers and stuff.
But leasing a few servers is easy, with the # of players we're talking about though we'd be talking about leasing a HUGE # of servers for a short period, but the company that's going to lease them has to have something to do with them afterwards in order to pay for them.
If someone came to me and asked to lease 2,000 servers for 1 month, unless my typical growth is such that those 2,000 servers are going to be leased by someone else soon I'm going to charge pretty close to what they cost me to buy.
I could be overestimating the # of servers Blizzard needs, but given how popular the game it just feels like you'd be dealing with huge #'s of things which makes it really hard to just spin up capacity at that scale.
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Hard to say for sure without knowing what kind of hardware they need for how many players and how much effort they put into being able to auto-deploy new servers and stuff.
But leasing a few servers is easy, with the # of players we're talking about though we'd be talking about leasing a HUGE # of servers for a short period, but the company that's going to lease them has to have something to do with them afterwards in order to pay for them.
If someone came to me and asked to lease 2,000 servers for 1 month, unless my typical growth is such that those 2,000 servers are going to be leased by someone else soon I'm going to charge pretty close to what they cost me to buy.
I could be overestimating the # of servers Blizzard needs, but given how popular the game it just feels like you'd be dealing with huge #'s of things which makes it really hard to just spin up capacity at that scale.
That's quite interesting, and makes a lot of sense.
I take it that the industry of server hosting is still rather decentralized and hodgepodge, so not a lot of companies have that volume of hardware available, let alone more business to run off them after? Why not go through 5, 10, 20, or 50?
I'm just thinking with the sheer volume of servers sitting in warehouses everywhere it should be possible. The unorganized state of the industries hardware side is the culprit. There must be a better way to efficiently act on this massive influx of information (although screaming 'buy more servers and single player1111!!!one' in allcaps on blizzards website is probably not it).
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That's quite interesting, and makes a lot of sense.
I take it that the industry of server hosting is still rather decentralized and hodgepodge, so not a lot of companies have that volume of hardware available, let alone more business to run off them after? Why not go through 5, 10, 20, or 50?
I'm just thinking with the sheer volume of servers sitting in warehouses everywhere it should be possible. The unorganized state of the industries hardware side is the culprit. There must be a better way to efficiently act on this massive influx of information (although screaming 'buy more servers and single player1111!!!one' in allcaps on blizzards website is probably not it).
The image that is deployed is almost certainly built for a specific set of hardware, for optimization and performance reasons, so I think you kind of answer your own question with your second point.
This isn't like running a Windows 2008 Server on the the Amazon Cloud to handle your files and emails.
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That's quite interesting, and makes a lot of sense.
I take it that the industry of server hosting is still rather decentralized and hodgepodge, so not a lot of companies have that volume of hardware available, let alone more business to run off them after? Why not go through 5, 10, 20, or 50?
I'm just thinking with the sheer volume of servers sitting in warehouses everywhere it should be possible. The unorganized state of the industries hardware side is the culprit. There must be a better way to efficiently act on this massive influx of information (although screaming 'buy more servers and single player1111!!!one' in allcaps on blizzards website is probably not it).
I've been thinking about this, and wondering if they are using some sort of Cloud services to provision servers? If so, it would all be virtual anyways and they could easily spin up how ever many servers they needed to handle the load, assuming the hosting provider has sufficient capacity.
