Rage knows a new name, and this name is Diablo3!

The internet was all a buzz on the hotly anticipated Diablo 3 release on Tuesday. Retailers had midnight launches and people booked days off work to dive into the latest installment of the click and shoot dungeon crawler that defined a genre.

And then Darkness Fell. To be fair, they said it would. Still, I don’t think they predicted this.

Instantly there were issues with the login, then those who were lucky enough to get in were bumped offline with a random error number. Internet Rage was instant and fierce. The forums were flooded with comments that ranged from weak grasping hopes of “Why? Why is this happening” to outright spewing of hate.

North American servers were up for a few hours, but late night on the 15th, they were shunted to emergency server maintenance which just fueled the hate. Players were teased with what they thought was a rough start only to be knocked down again.

But where does this hate really come from? Oh sure, piles of people now own this game that cannot be played and that seems like the obvious answer. But a little below the surface the problem is that this game cannot be played in SINGLE PLAYER mode without being connected to the Battle.net servers.

I am of two minds on this particular choice of Blizzard/Activision. I can see why they wanted authentication online. Game piracy is rampant, and this gives the biggest roadblock to trying to break this game. If you don’t log into Battle.Net then it doesn’t work.

But this is the other side and where the core of the real rage stems from. Why can’t I play single player mode? Authentication is a valid reason to have the game online. But when I have 15gb of game on my computer right now, why exactly do I have to be connected to their servers to play?

When the game loads, it already authenticates and brings up my character list. That works. This is fantastic. I can play on ANY computer that Diablo3 is installed on. My characters are always there. But that is where it should end. If I am not playing multiplayer, I should still be able to access the game to play my toons all by myself. But that is not how it works here. It’s all on their servers.

If Multiplayer was down but you could still solo, this rage would not exists. Well, maybe not as bad.

So for me, the game is on ice until a definitive answer is given on the state of the servers. I am getting kicked out every 5 minutes.

Are you still fighting with the servers? Or are you waiting too?