Does anyone have a US guest pass they can kick me?

I love loot games on console (Sacred 2, Borderlands, Dark Alliance, PSO, etc) but never had a PC that could game so I never played Diablo 2. When the beta for this hit I installed it and it ran like garbage (like 5 FPS, if that) so I didn't pick it up. But out of curiosity I just ran this laptop (Asus G50vt-X5, only gaming-capable PC we have) through systemlabrequirements and it says it should be fine. So I'd like to get the game so I can try to give it another go to figure out what the problem might be (thinking I might do a clean install of Windows 7 and ditch Vista that's on here), but obviously I don't want to commit to buying the game if I ultimately can't get it going.

Apparently, the game only works at Windows 7. My brother who is using a Vista laptop tried to download the client using one of my passes got denied, stating that "it needs a new OS". D3 isn't that power hungry anyhow so yeah, just give it a whirl. It's super fun.

Also: Diablo III Hotfixes - May (Updated 5/23/12) - Diablo III

Never relied too much on the Healing Mantra personally so I can say that I wasn't affected that much by the change.

I don't agree with a lot of the control-freak shit Blizzard pulls but denying Vista users the ability to play games is something I get get on board with.

Diablo 3 works not only on Vista but also XP; something else is going on there.

Did a search last night and found somewhat a solution at the euro battle.net forum. It involves turning on something called a 'secondary logon'. I'll try it on my brother's laptop later.

Weird. Hope he gets it figured out.

Also so did no one here buy it at retail? Not that I blame you, but fuck :(

I have the CE myself. The artbook is very purdy.

I have 2 more guest passes. I'll pm you the code when I come home later.

Iwata just hooked me up with a code, thanks!

But yeah, if I wind up getting this working I am going to be super, super sad that I missed the CE :(

Gigablah#1880

Current playing through Nightmare. DH with 2300+ DPS and very, very squishy.

I'll take a guest code if someone has one to spare :(

If I wind up getting the game in the next day or two I'll probably grab a retail copy anyway (gamestop credit) and if no one has hooked you up by then I can do so.

It's still downloading but I played for a when the download hit Optimal, can't quite pin down the performance issues. In the beta the title screen and character screen and all that jazz was flawless, but as soon as I got into the actual game it was running in super slow motion, completely unplayable. With the guest pass Iwata gave me for retail updating my video drivers seemed to have fixed that issue for the most part (when I played the beta I checked that and it said I had the most up to date drivers, but Nvidia lied, figures).

My problem now is really intermittent; basically in the entirety of the Tristam area it runs mostly fine with some very slight jank which is mildly annoying but totally playable. But then every few minutes regardless of where I am or if anything is happening or not I get the crazy slowdown/2 FPS for about 1-2 minutes, then it completely goes away. What's weird is that this seems to happen regardless of whether or not I have the game in 800x600 windowed with all settings as low as they will go OR if I'm running the game at completely maxed settings. It's bizarre.

Then I got to the cathederal area and the problem never happened once regardless of the setting levels. What's making it hard for me to figure out is that this doesn't seem to be the microstuttering issue that most people are having, but I'm having a hard time finding anything about my issue because I'm just finding stuff about that. If I have time before work tomorrow or when I get home I'm going to try a couple of things I found to see if I can get it figured out, saw some suggestions to run the game specifically only under a single core and some other oddly specific things so we'll see if that does anything. I also need to maybe mess more with the FPS settings, I left the background FPS at the default (8?) and I tried messing around with the foreground FPS some and I think right now I have it at 30, but looking online now it seems like most people are recommending unchecking the foreground FPS and checking V-Sync.

Goddamn it PC gaming! I'm still baffled by how I can run it at max settings randomly for no reason though (although the max resolution this laptop will take is I think 1368x768). Anyone have any other ideas, or did anyone else also have any problems randomly in that first area? PC specs (Asus G50VT-X5):

Processor 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7450
Memory 4GB, 800MHz DDR2
Hard drive 320GB 7,200rpm
Chipset Mobile Intel PM45 Express Chipset
Graphics 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9800M GS

Dopefish do you still need a code?

No thanks, Iwata hooked me up.

Sent one over as requested to Sass. I've still got two more, for some reason my standard edition had 3 in the box. If anyone else needs one let me know by sometime tomorrow, otherwise I'll pass them forward on GAF or something.

Obviously bought the game, and I think I may have just figured out the performance issue I was having above. I have almost the same exact setup as the guy here and he was having the exact same issue (runs totally fine, then goes to total shit 1-5 FPS for anywhere from 30 second to 2 minutes, then becomes totally fine again, all regardless of settings). He found out it's basically because his GPU was overheating because the CPU was overheating, and since it's a laptop they share the same heat pipe so the GPU was essentially shutting down until it cooled down enough to kick back on.

This makes total sense because this laptop has always gotten really hot, especially when playing games. He fixed it by reducing his maximum processor state to 85% so it still gets hot, but not hot enough to shut the GPU down. I haven't slept in forever so I'll give it a long run in the morning, but that sounds exactly like all of my problems so I think that'll hopefully do it. Played for about an hour this morning and a couple hours tonight, as far as I can determine if I run the game in 800x600 windowed with everything at minimum and the foreground FPS locked at 30 it seems to run fine with no issues indefinitely. Any time I started bumping settings up it would start randomly having that problem, even if it had been fine previously, then lowering the setting down to medium which was fine before would then also start randomly crapping out as well. Hopefully in the morning with an extended run I can confirm either way; I set the maximum processor state to 80% and will go from there, the processor requirement isn't really a problem in my case, as long as I can get the game to run smoothly at hopefully at medium settings I'm totally fine with that. Again, fucking PC gaming :(

Sass has been bugging me about this thing so if I could have one of your spare passes that would be great, thanks.

Additional Spam:
Saxypunch#1846 if that's relevant or necessary, no idea how this business works


V It's mine. Got it! Thanks again.

Sending it now, is that Sass' battletag or yours?

Basically the way they're getting around unique IDs is you still log into the game with your bnet information, but before you can play Diablo you have to create a Battle Tag on bnet which is whatever name you want but it then slaps # and 4 numbers after it. Then that's the in-game tag you need to add people to your friends list apparently (I've sent a couple of requests but they haven't been accepted yet, but I'm assuming the name appears in your friends list without the numbers?). I'm not sure if your BattleTag is across all Blizzard games or is Diablo specific though, I don't play any of their other stuff.

Battletags are throughout Blizzard. About the same ie. not playing their other stuff.

Just a heads up in case anyone wasn't aware, but people playing on the starter edition (through use of the codes) are only able to play with other starter edition people. You'd have to purchase the full game to play with everyone else.

Yup, but I'd imagine most people probably know if they're down for getting the game or not fairly quickly at least. Most people I'm seeing online who were trying to get codes were doing so for the same reason I was (to see if it would run, etc).

Speaking of which I seem to have totally solved my problems! The following will probably all sound really sad but keep in mind I've played like 3 PC games in my life so I don't know shit about PC hardware. Anyway our laptop has run pretty hot as long as I can remember, which I didn't think much of because it's a big laptop. Anyway I tried the fixes I was seeing around that I posted about like reducing the maximum power allowed to my CPU, running the game only on one core, etc and performance was still all over the place regardless of high or low settings; it would run totally fine, then go down to 1-5 FPS for 30-120 seconds, then be fine again. So I looked into it some more, and apparently our laptop is specifically notorious for it's shitty heating, so much so that people have come up with crazy shit to fix it. So I grabbed some software that monitors your PC temperatures etc to see what was up.

The Internet seems to indicate that as a general rule usually your idle GPU should be around 45C and ideally shouldn't be getting higher than about 80C during game, and anything over 90C being actively bad. So of course with the software tool our idle GPU temperature was an amazing 75C and Diablo was getting it up to 105-110C :twitch: Looked online for our model which has this issue pretty well documented with people trying latop cooler pads etc with mixed results at best. Most people seemed to get it fixed by having to open it up and blow it out every couple of months, taking the back off completely and leaving it that way, OR there were a number of people who did what this video shows. What looks like a fan vent on the bottom of the laptop isn't actually a fan vent, and there's no vent at all there which is fucking amazing, fuck you Asus. As the video shows the common fix is to drill/cut out what looks like the vent (to make it an actual vent), then replace the fake mesh with actual spaced mesh for breathing room and cut one of the wires to force the fan on all the time.

So I went out and spent $10 for the mesh and a can of air, but the can of air was as far as I needed apparently; the dust wasn't "thick" inside, but there was an absolute fuckton of it. Blew it out and then played Diablo at max settings for a while, no issues. More importantly the laptop now idles at 48-50c, and Diablo gets it up to only about 72-75 now, with the highest peak I saw for it of 78-79 (never hit 80). The laptop is now also (obviously) substantially cooler, and my only issues with Diablo are with just tweaking the settings for performance reasons (everything at max and running at fullscreen runs okay but with some slight framerate drops, trying to find the optimal combination of settings to resolve).

/pcgaming rant

So I'm super happy I got that taken care of, but goddamn I had no idea how poorly this laptop was set up or that it was getting that hot. Now I can actually focus on playing the damn game!

Man, people online weren't kidding about the Auction House making in-game crafting utterly useless. I just took a quick look as I was getting off tonight (lvl 13 DH) and for a 700 gold buyout in the AH I was able to buy a 2H Bow that was way better than what I was using (and I'm too low level to equip the next level of upgrades at the Blacksmith). That seems....broken. Maybe that's just more relevant earlier on though for weaker items?

Anyway having a fucking blast, and the computer held solid all day never getting higher than about 77C, running the game in a 1024 window but with all video settings maxed. Outside of like 2 hours of Diablo 2 I've never played a PC loot game before, having a blast.

That's more relevant early on, since people are dumping their old stuff on the auction house for old levels and not really caring. The AH gets expensive quickly the higher you level, especially when you're going for the best stats.

Crafting, meanwhile, gives you something to do with items that, in all honesty, don't vendor for all that much compared to the gold enemies start to drop. It takes a bunch of investment going in but I've been upgrading at least one armor piece every five levels or so using crafting.

I guess I should also mention I have two guest passes left, so just shoot me a message if you want to give the game a test run.

Went into this pretty skeptical. Finished the demo with Monk. Pretty good, I guess, not too excited. Tried Wizard. Didn't even finish the demo area. Oh, ice beam, big deal.

Then I tried a Witch Doctor. What's this? Jar of... Spiders? Jar of spiders. Jar of Spiders oboyoboyoboyoboy

Off to eBay to generate some disposable income, fuuuuuuck

I don't usually play mage-type classes so I can't comment, but I have seen people say that Wizard starts getting awesome at around level 14/15 (assuming you unlock something at that point).

I should start referring to quantities of spiders as Jars though.

The Wizard started getting useful for me once I unlocked Electrocute. Shortly after that, it began inheriting decent equipment from my other characters, so there was a pretty significant jump in killing power and survival in the span of just a few levels.