Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I really wish I'd had some way of reading the Terms of Service before buying this game. Instead I didn't get around to reading it until after I'd installed the game and was waiting for three hours to play it. In a nut shell, the TOS clearly states that you are not buying the ability to play this game. In my case I paid for a physical DVD, an instruction manual, a notepad, and a pretty box. That is it. Blizzard is very clear in the TOS that just because you bought this game doesn't mean you paid for the right to play it. That is worrying on many many levels, and takes the whole Amazon/iTunes concept of "You don't own your digital content you just rent it" a little bit too far for my taste. Amazon and Apple have at least shown "good cause" when they've been forced by legal action to pull things you paid for from your library, Blizzard takes it to a whole new level and says that at any time (and for any reason) they can prevent you from playing this game. Servers are full? Too bad. Server crashed? Too bad. You were in the middle of a boss fight when it happened? Sucks to be you. I could understand this, I really could if this was World of Warcraft or any other game that is a MMORPG. Diablo III isn't. It's a single player (which Blizzard is now calling solo) game with the option to play online with friends. Sadly as an insular myopic loner, I have no friends and as such I have no desire to play Diablo III with them. And yet, I can't play the game if the servers are down, full, or if Blizzard is having an otherwise bad day. The simplest solution is to play on other servers in other regions. Which sounds nice, but is TOS violation and prevents you from getting any sort continuity for your character. I've got a Demon Hunter on Americas, a Barbarian on Europe, and a Witch Doctor in Asia, and only the barbarian has been stable enough to play to level 10. Which is too bad, because chucking jars of spiders at the undead while your own zombie dogs chew on their faces never gets old. And neither does rapid fire with a flaming bow. But enough of the server problems, the random "going going gone" mindset of Blizzard. The game itself, when playable is fun. It's not awesome. It's not even great. But it is fun. So far its Diablo II with upgraded graphics (which aren't mind blowing either, just good...maybe great for three years ago but my todays standard, just good), tweaked gameplay (which you are either going to despise, or be like me and be indifferent too), with lots of play space. Which would be cool, if the game wasn't so liner. The maps and world is huge, but most of its rather pointless because of all the places you can go, explore, and slaughter things in are mostly incidental to the story and the advancement of your character and the story. Well, at least so far. If I can get on and actually play the game for more than half an hour at a time, I'll let you know if that changes. Edited: Well it's been two weeks now and I feel the need to provide an update. The game is a twenty minute game, meaning I can play it for about twenty minutes before I'm bored with the click move shift click destroy things. Which is good, because after twenty minutes of play the lag has become so annoying that the game is unplayable. It's ironic, the lag...for a single/solo player game...is so bad the game can't be played as a single player game. Ofcourse it wouldn't be irony if it weren't that the majority of the very features that require the game to be online, auction house (both the in game gold and the real world money) and multiplayer grouping are once again offline (the auction house has been down for three or four days). So even if I wanted too take advantage of the very features that are killing the single player experience...I can't. Awesome. But not the good kind of awesome.