It"s been a day that for gamers has been nearly four years in the making. The full version of Diablo III is finally available to the public. Blizzard turned on the servers on its Battle.net service as expected a few hours ago for people in North America, with European and some Asian players getting the chance to sign on a few hours earlier.
As expected, the rush of hundreds of thousands of players to sign onto the Battle.net servers caused Blizzard some headaches in the early morning hours. GamePolitics.com reports that Blizzard temporarily took down the Battle.net websites along with adding more servers in order to handle the influx of new players.
Indeed, as GameSpy.com reports, many of those new gamers got to see the message, "The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later. (Error 37)". The same article points out that many of these issues would not have happened if Blizzard didn"t insist that an Internet connection be required to play Diablo III, even in its single player mode.
One player claims to have not had any issues with playing the game. Indeed, this person posted on NeoGAF that he "finished" the game in about 12 1/2 hours with his Barbarian character at level 32. It"s likely that this player simply rushed through to the end as quickly as possible and missed a lot of the side missions and content.