Diablo 3 got off to a pretty rocky start on Tuesday. Like most sane people, I spent all day with my new love and it was awful. I experienced intermittent issues and the servers went down for emergency maintenance three separate times. Is anyone really surprised? I’ve been waiting for this game for over ten years and I’m not a snowflake. There are millions of Diablo fans and even more Blizzard fans that were just as eager to get their hands on a release day copy as I was. Server issues are to be expected for any day one release and in reality, don’t affect the quality of a game over the long term. It is my personal opinion, and it is my further opinion that said opinion is the right opinion, that day one server issues should be nothing more than a footnote, barely mentioned as the reviewer goes on to talk about the thing that the developers put years of their time into creating.
Still, that didn’t stop users from dropping unfair reviews on Metacritic, where I personally saw the average score reach 2.0. “If I can’t play the game I can’t rate it…” says one user, who then proceeded to give it a zero anyway. Another user writes, “Absurd how badly blizzard screwed this up. There isn’t even an offline mode … Other than this the game itself is very fun and plays smoothly.” He also gave the game a zero. I know what you’re thinking. These are just random people on the internet. If you attempt to hold them to any standard of quality, you’ll only end up hurt. I get that. There was another user that called Diablo 3 “a diablo clone”, so obviously I don’t take what they said to heart, but the sheer number of similar reviews leads me to believe that the majority just doesn’t understand what a review is supposed to be.
So when I write my review I won’t be mentioning the server issues, because in a week they wont matter and in five years they won’t be remembered, but I’ll still be playing Diablo 3.
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