Since undoubtedly many of you out there in Giant Bomb land are either busy already plundering the depths of Sanctuary, or eagerly counting the hours until work/school's end so that you can go home and play already, I figured it might be a good idea to wave a quick caution flag regarding a few bugs and issues that have been reported since Diablo III's launch last night.

The biggest and most terrifying of the bugs is a genuine game-breaker, according to various threads in the Blizzard forums. In this case, it appears that anyone who equips a Templar follower with a different shield will suddenly encounter a synchronization error and be dropped from the game's servers. Users are additionally reporting that even upon restarting the client and attempting to log back in, a dreaded "Error 3006" message appears and prevents them from doing so.

This error may be limited to the Demon Hunter class, but regardless of class, it's probably best if you hold off on doing any shield switching with your Templar buddy until Blizzard posts a fix (which Eurogamer reports is on the way), just to be safe.

Blizzard has also addressed a couple of other issues, including a character creation error that somehow maxes your character list, as well as the more nebulous errors 14009 and 315300. For the character creation bug, Blizzard suggests that simply logging out and then logging back in may fix the problem. For the other errors, the current workaround involves creating a new Windows user account with admin permissions, and try again from there. Not exactly an ideal solution, but it's what they've got right now.

Between these errors and some of the more innocuous login errors related to high server traffic, Diablo III's launch certainly has a few landmines to navigate. While it's possible (probable, even) that many players won't run into many, if any of these issues, that's probably not going to be much comfort to those that have.

Since undoubtedly many of you out there in Giant Bomb land are either busy already plundering the depths of Sanctuary, or eagerly counting the hours until work/school's end so that you can go home and play already, I figured it might be a good idea to wave a quick caution flag regarding a few bugs and issues that have been reported since Diablo III's launch last night.

The biggest and most terrifying of the bugs is a genuine game-breaker, according to various threads in the Blizzard forums. In this case, it appears that anyone who equips a Templar follower with a different shield will suddenly encounter a synchronization error and be dropped from the game's servers. Users are additionally reporting that even upon restarting the client and attempting to log back in, a dreaded "Error 3006" message appears and prevents them from doing so.

This error may be limited to the Demon Hunter class, but regardless of class, it's probably best if you hold off on doing any shield switching with your Templar buddy until Blizzard posts a fix (which Eurogamer reports is on the way), just to be safe.

Blizzard has also addressed a couple of other issues, including a character creation error that somehow maxes your character list, as well as the more nebulous errors 14009 and 315300. For the character creation bug, Blizzard suggests that simply logging out and then logging back in may fix the problem. For the other errors, the current workaround involves creating a new Windows user account with admin permissions, and try again from there. Not exactly an ideal solution, but it's what they've got right now.

Between these errors and some of the more innocuous login errors related to high server traffic, Diablo III's launch certainly has a few landmines to navigate. While it's possible (probable, even) that many players won't run into many, if any of these issues, that's probably not going to be much comfort to those that have.

aw hell

Seems Diablo 3 has a secret boss and its name is Error 37

I switched my Templar's shield immediately and had no problems, soo... yeah. Maybe Blizzard should have *gasp* delayed it.

I don't think these are that crazy given the size of the game. I haven't run into them though, so maybe I'm biased.

I'm glad I have to wait to purchase it. Hopefully the problems will be patched before I get to buy it.

God damn.

I didn't experience the Templar shield bug while playing as my Wizard this morning.

The rest of the issues seem to stem purely from the servers being crushed. It took me about 90 minutes to login this morning, but once I was in I was golden.

just lol

Error 37 is just traffic control for the login server. Beta had it too, just keep trying. Better than it just up and crashing like the WoW login used to do.

Utterly pathetic and inexcusable bullshit.

Many of the issues mentioned were already posted on the US forums by EU players earlier in the day. The same issues were addressed by GMs and many people did not read them which caused even more issues. Error 37 is this: "Error 37 - This error indicates that the Diablo III server is full and is likely the result of high login traffic. If you receive this error message, please wait and try again."

Bashiok specifically said right after the Asia Diablo 3 server openings that Error 37 was something they implemented for the launch but just didnt rename it because eventually they will be removing it. In his words, players just need to keep retrying the login.

Silly people trying to play a blizzard game on day 1. People ought to know better by now.

Well at least this game doesn't have the worst DRM in existence and you can just play singleplayer offline.

OH WAIT

It's an MMO launch so no big surprises there. Oh wait . .

Kind of used to PC releases of this magnitude having a few issues when launched, but Blizzard is usually pretty quick and decent about fixing it. It's gotta go better than some of the game Bethesda has published in the past year. I doubt these problems will hurt Diablo in any meaningful way like it did Brink.

In terms of a percentage, though, how many people are actually having issues? Relative to the huge number of players I bet the frequency of such issues is insignificant.

Unless it's happening to you, obviously. In which case it's the worst thing ever.

@depecheload said:

Utterly pathetic and inexcusable bullshit.

How do you figure?

Over hyped ass game nothing new nothing special

Game is fun as heck and these issues are a bit silly.

While I do think that it sucks for some folks (no sympathy for any loud-mouthed idiots) that they're having issues with the game, I personally haven't experienced any trouble. Started playing around 7am local time, no logging issues or such.

But with how many times I've jinxed myself by now, I'll probably end up receiving an error, resulting in my account being deleted...

Been playing for the past few hours. All has been fine for me.

@Sweep said:

In terms of a percentage, though, how many people are actually having issues? Relative to the huge number of players I bet the frequency of such issues is insignificant.

Unless it's happening to you, obviously. In which case it's the worst thing ever.

It doesn't matter if it's 0.0001% of users. The internetz will rage over nothing. Some of the comments on this are just so typical. It's a huge software launch. There will be bugs no matter how much testing happens. Blizzard will have them patched in no time. Carry on.

My only remaining issue right now is that sometimes achievement progress is not registering at all, this would not be an issue but the achieveement system feeds into your banner customization. So far I'm missing huge amount of unavoidable achievements for Act1.

I feel the urge to play SC2.

No templa bug with my Witch Hunter either.

For me, this has been a smooth launch. Only had to try like 3, 4 times at 00:40 yesterday to maneuver the error 37. Way less issues than feared.

online only is a drag

jeez really? create a new windows profile? right click and run-as administrator anyone?

@Vodun said:

@depecheload said:

Utterly pathetic and inexcusable bullshit.

How do you figure?

I'm in that ever-increasing minority that bugs should NOT be in finished games, unless they are related to unexpected/updated hardware configurations. I'm sorry, you spend years making a game and testing it, then it should work right the day it comes out, stop shipping unfinished games.

There's no excuse for it. I'm a freelance writer, if I turn in an unfinished article, my ass gets fired.

Hopefully this is all sorted out by... this evening.

Getting the game purchased and installed was a bit of a challenge last night with Blizzard's websites crashing like crazy, but logged on this morning and played a couple hours with no problem, on my Macbook Pro no less! A little lag at times, which is annoying since I'm playing single player, but nothing bad.

I'm going to wait until after my exams before picking it up and hopefully by then most of the launch issues will be sorted.

I'm pretty glad I didn't pre-order a digital copy and try to get in on the server's launch. A friend tried to get in for an hour and a half last night.

Thanks for the heads up about the shield bug alex. Was maybe gonna roll a demon hunter when I got the game today.

Three cheers for always online policies!

Can we un-god blizzard at this point? They used to be "that dev that always released polished games etc. etc." but with this launch, and the fact that they have the always online thing (which may or may not be an issue to people, I don't really care as I'm a stationary PC dude, and I'm always online.. Mostly anyways, barring ISP issues.) can we finally put Blizzard in with all other devs? Well, aside from Valve, obviously. (fricken free MASSIVE expansion pack for portal still boggles the mind..)

A bit tired of Blizzard being held in such high regard even after butchering WoW, releasing StarCraft 3D at idiotic prices, and now Diablo 3.. They're no better than any other dev as far as I'm concerned. They're good and all, but no better than any other good dev.

Great idea leashing a game to the internet Blizzard!

Man... not even Blizzard can make a game that works at release anymore. That's a damn shame. =(

played all night without issue, got logged in at 12:30 without incident, playing the demon hunter with several friends so no companion which is possibly how i avoided that bug.

That's what happens when you rush development to get your game out as quickly as possible. 
Oh wait.

This is why I never buy games with always online DRM bullshit.

@CosmicQueso said:

@Sweep said:

In terms of a percentage, though, how many people are actually having issues? Relative to the huge number of players I bet the frequency of such issues is insignificant.

Unless it's happening to you, obviously. In which case it's the worst thing ever.

It doesn't matter if it's 0.0001% of users. The internetz will rage over nothing. Some of the comments on this are just so typical. It's a huge software launch. There will be bugs no matter how much testing happens. Blizzard will have them patched in no time. Carry on.

Nothing? This ain't a fucking MMO, man, it's a goddamn dungeon crawler. People shouldn't have to deal with server issues when they want to roll in single player.

This kind of crap is inexcusable, given the amount of time they have worked on it.

To be on Blizzard's side... this game is huge and it randomizes everything and is online, probably impossible to figure these things sometimes.

To be against Blizzard's side... WTF mayne? I thought number of years was directly proportional to game's quality... NOT!

Only issue I have come across was with the Blizzard downloader and that was easily fixed. So  far very much enjoying it. 

My first thought is I'm glad my Diablo III parties are planned 1.5 - 2 weeks after launch. My second thought is, man, it's really sad and disappointing these errors weren't ironed out during the beta testing. I am not buying the game until pay day. This news makes me happy I may have avoided a lot of frustration.

@Mystyr_E said:

Seems Diablo 3 has a secret boss and its name is Error 37

Z...zing?

The wait to join the game was torturous, perhaps it's because everyone's trying to log in at the same time when the servers went online but other than that I haven't any trouble playing the game. Oh yeah and the character creation bug was weird, kept saying the request timed out and when I logged back in I had like 10 different Monk characters on my screen.

@Andtheworld: maybe you should bitch at the people who steal things and make this a necessity for a company to make money...

It blows my mind how we still have this problem in 2012. You'd think a developer like Blizzard, with all that money and all those servers, would be able to handle the traffic. Surely they knew how many people were going to be buying the game and trying to play it at once?

It just seems crazy to be that after all the big launches, we still get this problem. I mean, how can they not have enough bandwidth/whatever to let everyone play? Ugh.

Not quite a nothing problem. I tried to login and play over the course of 2 1/2 hours last night until I could finally even create a character. I started plowing through a dungeon and then got dropped from the server, which booted me back out to the man menu. After another ten minutes of trying to log back in, and I found myself back at the start of the game. So great... losing connection to their server means you can also lose game progress. Sweet.

Well I guess it's a good thing I didn't get Diablo 3 yet.