Basically you have to be hooked in to the Battlenet servers the whole time you're playing, even if you're only playing single-player. It works like an MMO, you loose connection, it kicks you out. In pushing the whole "it's kind of like an MMO but you can play alone" thing they've also taken the highly bizzare step of not allowing you to pause the game, which really sucks when the phone rings during a boss fight.

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hmm maybe I am just to used to MMO's for the no pause thing to bother me.

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D3 releases tonight at midnight! I think there is a pre-downloader floating about the internet at the moment, for those of you interested. Also be sure to choose your battletag.

A friend of mine has booked the week off work, and spent today cooking every meal he'll need until Sunday and sealing it tupperware so he doesn't have to break into his play time to cook.

Oh dear.

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I don't think the game is going THAT good haha. All I know is my PC can't the handle the game so until I can get it upgraded I will remain out in the rain.

Your friend is going a little overboard, haha. I understand being excited for a video game. I don't understand re-arranging your life to play it. People have been waiting nearly 12 years for this, though.

So, having said I wasn’t going to get it, my fiancée bought me the game for my birthday (early present). Aside from the server issues on the actual launch day (they seemed to be sorted yesterday), I have one really major complaint which didn’t pop up during the mass test weekend. The game has quite a strong atmosphere, and a fairly interesting story (so far), and I want to experience that properly. One sure fire way to ruin this for me is to put someone else there with me. I have quite a long list of friends on Battlenet, both real life friends, and people I know through my 5 year stint playing WoW. And they kept joining my game. Here’s where my complaint is, you cannot stop people just hopping in and out of your session, if they’re on your friends list, they can jump in any time they please.

I’m totally up for that once I’ve finished the story and want to mess around with some of the other content, or for playing through a second time with a different class, but for my first playthrough it’s infuriating. When you’re trying to get into a story/world, and there’s a Demon Hunter constantly spinning in circles spamming their attack while you’re getting some conversation snippets, or another player reaches an objective first and skips all the dialogue because “I did it already”, or “I just want to kill stuff”, or you die because the monsters immediately double in strength when someone else joins, even though they spawn back in town while you’re in the middle of a melee, it really ruins the experience. I seemed to spend more of my evening going, “I don’t want to sound like a dick, but could you just piss off out of my game, because you’re kind of spoiling it for me”, than I did actually playing. All it needs is a confirmation dialogue so you can say go away when someone tries to party with you (like every other game in the history of ever).

If anyone has managed to find a magic button somewhere that keeps you playing solo, I would dearly love to know about it, because I couldn’t find one.

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that sounds truly obnoxious. How do game developers eff up things like that?

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Do not bore me with such trite cliches. For I have you in my clutches, and should I choose, I could snuff out your insignificant lives in an instant.

*Puffs on pipe* Money, dear boy.

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This was the world that I had created. I know what I have to do to fix it...to make things right. There's no problem that can't be solved.

Can't you create a private game like in D2?