"Let the buyer beware": the decline of personal responsibility

[Adramalech]

I... I am shocked.

Sir, you managed to articulate into a single post everything that I think about the kind of people you're refering to.

I would kiss you now if I could. Completely agree with your post, and have no objections. Though I'm not sure if I'd call it a decline... that kind of people who never take responsability for their choices have existed since forever. You see it all the time, about nearly anything possible.

Anyway, very good post. I bow to you.

[Donax]

So, "There might be a slight delay while logging in" is the equivalent of, "Logging in will temporarily be unavailable, impossible, and remain a feat to come by in the following days!!!"

That's as much as a warning as, "Putting a gun to your head might cause minor injuries..." Completely disregarding the fact that it'll kill you.

I had no problem logging in at 4am, but I had friends who couldn't just because some people couldn't doesn't mean no one could.

I'm sorry Blizzard didn't have the foresight to give you VERY specific warnings regarding what would happen on a live game. They should burn in hell for that

Also I know your kind I used to work at a restaurant that would get busy. Your that person that we would tell the wait was 30-45minutes for a table and that the kitchen was backed up and that food would take a bit longer than normal. You would then come up after 10minutes wondering what the issue was and then complain when food took 15minutes instead of 10 and you ordered the steak well done

[Deleted]

I had no problem logging in at 4am, but I had friends who couldn't just because some people couldn't doesn't mean no one could.

I'm sorry Blizzard didn't have the foresight to give you VERY specific warnings regarding what would happen on a live game.

The warning is quite irrelevant to me. You need it to establish your argument. I don't. Just another strawman for me to burn down. Fact of the matter remains, they took money for a service they couldn't provide.

They should burn in hell for that.

At last, an agreement has been reached. Where's my torch?

[digger66]

While I do agree about people having to take responsibility of their own actions, your analogies are ridiculously fallacious and incomparable to the Diablo 3 issues all together.

Diablo 3 isn't McDonalds. People aren't complaining about the negative effects D3 is having on their lives.
Diablo 3 isn't an ordered "service" that was mistakenly replaced by another service. No one ordered D3, but ended up getting SC2 instead.

Diablo 3 is a game you bought but were unable to play due to the inability of the company behind it to foresee the amount of players it would have and because of the choices they had made when designing the game. "The always on DRM!" as they call it. That's not NOT taking responsibility for your actions. That's a company failing to give you the service you haven't just ordered but already paid for! Entirely different story than getting a wrong game or some other arbitrary crap.

You want analogies? I'll give you some.

Go to a restaurant; pay up; don't get your food.
Buy yourself a car; Car won't turn on unless you sit in it for 4 hours at a time.
Buy a house; Key to the only door won't work.

These are fitting analogies. Your's are not.
You're tired of people complaining? I've had it with people sticking up for these MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR companies, who make mistakes due to greed and not due to inability. If you feel like Blizzard is defensible, regarding Diablo 3's downtime, ask yourself this: Where the problems avoidable had they invested in avoiding them or not, and then come back to the question whether the failure of a company is the failure of the consumer and not the other way around.

Is it ok to agree with you and teh OP post? I feel like a hypocrite because I agree with op, but with you as well. The thing is the down time I have faced in no way equals the up time. I do have a blast playing the game. I do think teh majority of people are self serving intolerant consumers with no real idea of logic. I do fell Blizzard could have done a better job at launch and now several weeks later. I think this is one of teh best threads I ahve ever read with one of teh best replies I have ever read.

Well put both sides of argument.

EDIT-- I would like to add that the vast majority of people wanting things fixed or nerfed or buffed, apparently do not realize that there is down time involved and they are currently doing it on a weekday in teh middle of normal school and or work hours. Hmmmmmmmm, probably teh best time to do it.

[Donax]

The warning is quite irrelevant to me. You need it to establish your argument. I don't. Just another strawman for me to burn down. Fact of the matter remains, they took money for a service they couldn't provide.



At last, an agreement has been reached. Where's my torch?

The warning is actually all that matters. You weren't duped into buying a game that you couldn't play.

If you're still unable to login today then yes I agree you deserve a refund, but this simply isn't the cast for most people.

My question is this, when they give a warning for server maintenance do you get all raged up because you can't play or do you simply go ok I know that I won't be able to play from 10-2 on tuesday?

[Deleted]

The warning is actually all that matters. You weren't duped into buying a game that you couldn't play.

If you're still unable to login today then yes I agree you deserve a refund, but this simply isn't the cast for most people.

My question is this, when they give a warning for server maintenance do you get all raged up because you can't play or do you simply go ok I know that I won't be able to play from 10-2 on tuesday?

As a matter of fact, as mentioned, it's been about two days now in which I haven't been able to log in when I so desired. That aside...
You still didn't present a warning of unexpected server downtime prior to launch. As stated, the warning you posted was one of delayed logins. Not delayed server uptime due to traffic. Which they issued apologies for the following day, mind you... So either way, you still have no case.

As for your question; No, I don't throw a tantrum because the downtime was to be expected. Had they issued such a detailed warning, I.e. mentioned both the down time and the maintenance time, I wouldn't have wasted a good night in which I thought I'd be able to revel in the goodness of demon innards, nor would I complain the following day.

[Eadoin]

OP: I think we should be friends. We think alike.

[Donax]

As a matter of fact, as mentioned, it's been about two days now in which I haven't been able to log in when I so desired. That aside...
You still didn't present a warning of unexpected server downtime prior to launch. As stated, the warning you posted was one of delayed logins. Not delayed server uptime due to traffic. Which they issued apologies for the following day, mind you... So either way, you still have no case.

As for your question; No, I don't throw a tantrum because the downtime was to be expected. Had they issued such a detailed warning, I.e. mentioned both the down time and the maintenance time, I wouldn't have wasted a good night in which I thought I'd be able to revel in the goodness of demon innards.

They gave a warning that said delayed logins that would result in an error 37. I received those and kept trying and got in. They said they would monitor and if need be limit the number of people coming in. This all points to a warning that you may not be able to play right at midnight.

I expected downtime because this wasn't the first game I've ever played. All my friends took off tuesday to play. I took off Thursday and played all day. They didn't. you know why? I expected downtime because I have played other games on release :P

[chrisisvacant]

The warning is quite irrelevant to me. You need it to establish your argument. I don't. Just another strawman for me to burn down. Fact of the matter remains, they took money for a service they couldn't provide.



At last, an agreement has been reached. Where's my torch?

No, they took money for a service they -could- provide and had people on-hand to repair said service were it to temporarily wink out. Which is what they did and have done. You seem to just like to speak punitively. That's your prerogative, I suppose, but it doesn't make your argument salient.

[Donax]

Prince gets it!

I'm sorry to say this, but people are dumb.

I can't play for a day /RAGEQUIT I WANT MY MONEY BACK NOW!!!!!!!

Who does that? I've seen toddlers with more self control than these people.

[Stanton Biston]

The logical extreme of this is that I can create an amusement park ride in which riders over the height of 6'2" lose their heads and riders under 5'8" fly out and die.

Caveat Emptor.

[Deleted]

So since you said this is also about Diablo 3. Yes, people knew it was online only, but people expected it would WORK! People expected that they'd actually be able to PLAY THE GAME, not have "ERROR 37" or whatever over their screen every few days. I defended them for the first week, although I did think this was a bad idea, but we're in the third week and this still happens. This is like beta version sent to live. This is not a complaint about crap because people don't like the game, this is about the game not working properly. So in your examples, this is the bad food and bad mixed paint. It's the company's fault.

That said, maybe some people bought it and like it, but because of all the errors and dc-s and crap they need to blame something. And who do they blame? Online only mode. That said, I would have loved it to be able to be offline play as well, so we discuss that, but I, for one, won't demand a refund because it's online only, I knew that, I didn't know that the servers will be so crap it will be unplayable several days each week. Because of this I consider the game crap. If I bought any other game and it didn't work because of something the company screwed up, I would demand a refund. Diablo 3 is now not working for many people because Blizzard screwed up with the server infrastructure.

[mistuhbull]

Maybe, just maybe, many of the D3 errors are PEBKAC. I have yet to have any of my friends, in different parts of the world, have issues with getting on or playing D3

[Donax]

The logical extreme of this is that I can create an amusement park ride in which riders over the height of 6'2" lose their heads and riders under 5'8" fly out and die.

Caveat Emptor.

Yeah but that was just like one sign when I first entered the queue and besides this new amusement park that everyone has waited for has too many people in it on opening day and lines are like 4 hours long so it's their fault anyways for now building the ride with enough room for everyone

[ambigiouslynamed]

to bad its nigh impossible to actually return stuff anymore after you've used it and found out it was a piece of crap

[Zestrenocya]

To the OP and others:

Most of the time, I would agree with the original poster. In fact, if you are playing on a US server, I wholeheartedly agree with the original poster. I'm in the US and I tend to have some lag issues between about 7pm pacific and 10pm pacific which I'm sure is peak load time for US servers. Even so, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the US launch and people complaining about it seem to primarily be having hardware issues. It's not blizzard's responsibility to optimize your computer, it's yours. (It is, however, blizzard's responsibility to ensure their game works with a myriad of different hardware drivers and items. My impression of it is that there were some problems with this originally but those have been addressed for the most part.)

HOWEVER, from what I have read here and elsewhere, the EU servers are vastly more problematic. I don't know the reasons behind this as I'm in the US, but were I on an EU server, I might be raising a much bigger stink like some of the posters here seem to be doing.

Then again, I might not be. I think D3 is okay for what I expected, but probably already on the downswing for me. I played it like the devil the first week, and I'm already losing interest. I'm not terribly disappointed in this because I got the game through the WoW AP and was going to continue playing WoW for a year anyway. If I'd paid full retail, I might be a bit more upset. Of course, I'd be upset with myself for buying a bad game, not with blizz for providing a game that didn't fit my expectations.

[GarGar]

I think many non-Americans are either not used to or don't believe in more traditional capitalist ideals such as "buyer beware". Which is totally fine by me, as long as you keep it in your country and not try to bring it into mine.

I can see both sides, though. American-style capitalism doesn't exist everywhere, so if Blizz wants to sell in a country with stronger consumer protection laws, they better be willing to follow those laws, up to and including providing refunds for services not-rendered.

[Beavis]

Maybe, just maybe, many of the D3 errors are PEBKAC. I have yet to have any of my friends, in different parts of the world, have issues with getting on or playing D3

Yep, it's totally PEBKAC. Blizzard's Ks and Blizzard's Cs.

[Stanton Biston]

to bad its nigh impossible to actually return stuff anymore after you've used it and found out it was a piece of crap

Actually, I've returned half eaten fish back to the market and Saint's Row 2 back to Gamestop. Oh, all Fallout: New Vegas. After I opened/played/ate them.

[ThunderPussy]

So much win OP. Thank you!

---------- Post added 2012-05-31 at 09:46 PM ----------

So, "There might be a slight delay while logging in" is the equivalent of, "Logging in will temporarily be unavailable, impossible, and remain a feat to come by in the following days!!!"

That's as much as a warning as, "Putting a gun to your head might cause minor injuries..." Completely disregarding the fact that it'll kill you.

So not being able to play D3 might've killed you? You should probably shut your comp off for a bit and get outside.