Considering that it’s a small release with no substantial following, you may not have heard that a publisher named Activision Blizzard put out a game called Diablo III today. It’s a sequel to a game released in 2000 called Diablo II that not many people played. The people who made it are named Blizzard, who has also made some lesser-known games like World of Warcraft and Starcraft II. The original Starcraft is a national pastime in the little known country South Korea.
I lied. Everyone knows what Diablo III is. The Akuntsu tribes that live far from urban society, concealed in the Amazon rainforest, had Diablo III downloaded and ready to go on their Battle.net accounts three days ago in anticipation of the midnight launch. The entire pantheon of Greek deities including Zeus is playing Diablo III right now. It’s pretty popular.
No release of a huge game that requires an Internet connection to play is free of foibles, bugs, and problems though. Diablo III is no exception. Here’s a quick round up of common problems afflicting intrepid adventurers as they plunge into the game’s dungeons for the first time.
* Error 37
The biggest, ugliest of the Diablo III errors only hurt players when the floodgates were opened last night. Thousands of players that attempted to log into Blizzard’s authentication server were completely shut out of the game, seeing only the following “Error 37” message: “Due to high concurrency, the login servers are currently at full capacity.” After 12 years of anticipation, Diablo III players crashed the game’s servers the second the game was playable. Internet response was swift and hilarious, with “Error 37” becoming a trending topic on Twitter almost immediately. The problem has largely been fixed as of this writing.
* Error 315300
An error intended to mark user login errors—namely incorrectly written usernames, passwords, or copy-and-pasted text with non-plain text placed in those fields—popped up for a number of Diablo III beta participants entering the correct information. This is caused by, as Polygon reported on Tuesday, a subfolder in Diablo’s ProgramData directories with elevated privileges, blocking the Windows account user that installed the game. Creating a new Windows account and launching the game through it can work around this problem.
* Error 3006
Stay away from the Templay follower in Diablo III. Eurogamer reported that some players who equipped the seemingly helpful warrior encountered early in the game with a shield were booted out of the game. When they tried to log back in, they received the “Error 3006” message and were blocked out. Others were completely locked out of their Battle.net accounts. Blizzard said it is already preparing a fix for players afflicted by this error.
