Blessed by the Potato

Blizzard is a company renowned for its quality. Even with World of WarCraft, which saw unprecedented demand that overloaded servers, they did their best to make the game marginally playable as soon as possible.

So far, StarCraft 2 has not lived up to the Blizzard name, the rollout being much worse than WoW, without the extraneous factor of hordes of unexpected players. My preorder never arrived, and caving to the irrational logic that I had spent the whole day waiting for it, I rushed out to the store in the evening to pick up a second copy (I’ll return the preorder whenever it arrives, or resell it to a friend that hasn’t purchased yet — nudge nudge, Netbug). So far, this is not Blizzard’s fault, but put me into a rather foul frame of mind before the disc even hit the drive.

The install took forever, literally over two hours. What game, from a single disc, takes two hours to install? It was ridiculous! Then, after all that… I couldn’t play!

I was getting a message that the Battle.net servers were “temporarily unavailable”, though nothing of the sort was true. Unfortunately, my account has fallen prey to a weird, rare bug (though how rare is tough to say, because if you have it you can’t post on the forums!). It seems to be affecting Canadian accounts the most, so beware Canuck gamers!

I of course tried all the recommendations, even going so far as to uninstall and reinstall the game (another 2 hours gone!). What’s extra infuriating about the whole thing is that I was most psyched to play the single player game tonight, and the ever fucking DRM won’t let me until it’s connected to the authorization server, which is up (and which I can connect to in my web browser!), but which the game stubbornly continues to tell me is temporarily down!

Arg!

This is so especially frustrating because not only was I looking forward to the game, but I had set aside special time today to jump in and play. This day was supposed to be special, to mark the turnaround point where my life was supposed to start getting better, damnit. Instead I’ve wasted most of a day, and even the work I did get done — submitted author proofs! I’m getting published, bitches! — can’t put me into anything less than a burning rage as I go off to bed. I want to rip my own head off, and send my unfeeling body, powered by rage and frustration alone in defiance of all known laws of physics and physiology, on a holy mission of vengeance towards Blizzard. There it will tear the buildings down around the heads of tech support until the DRM is gone and we can play once more. While that happens, teams of scientists and practised warlocks will hook my disembodied head directly into the machines, improving my reaction speed so that I can once again marshall the forces of the Koprulu sector with unparalleled efficiency and skill, crushing all opposition beneath my boot… as it was foretold.

I must say, I’m really unimpressed with the complete lockdown on SC2: no LAN means the host for a “LAN” party will have to have a robust enough internet connection and router to get everyone connected to Battle.net servers in order to play together. Even the single player requires an internet connection. Yes, after it’s authorized the first time — which is where I’m stuck at — you can play offline for up to 30 days before authorizing again, but that’s still pretty draconian. Some people have reported that there’s a crack out already to beat the DRM… sad that the pirates can play the game and I can’t.

Nuclear launch detected.