D3, Diablo down on normal, revised thoughts.

Trying to formulate my thoughts now that normal is done.

While my thoughts regarding difficulty remain the same, overall, I really enjoyed the playthrough.  I pushed through all of act IV yesterday, I don't know that is was as long as the other acts, or maybe I missed a bunch of side quests.  The point is, I was so engrossed in the story, that I had to see it through to the end.  I'm glad that I did all of it on normal first.  Being a first-time Diablo player, I soaked up the story like a shammy on a Shamwow commercial.  I do believe, that the storyline gets better with each act, and the end was purely epic. Thanks goes out to TRBLEMAKER (Boomslang) for grouping up with me. :)  The cinematics are fantastic, and each one drove me on to the next act.  Now on to the next level where I am thinking that strategy will become more of a factor. 

I'm still having error issues to some degree; yesterday damn near brought on a heart attack.  I had taken a break and was logging back into the game.  While trying to do that, I had error 315300 pop up.  Looking through the forums, I saw the word 'hacked' and about fell out of my chair.  Mind you, I don't feel that personally invested in the game at this point, BUT this is tied to Battle.net which in turn is tied to WoW.  Yes, that game.  I am tied to WoW ways I can't even begin to describe.  Anyway, panic set in, and I started scrambling.  Never mind that I do have an authenticator, I am set up for the sms notifications, and I run scheduled scans on my machine.  All that was out the window as I tried to log into the Bnet website to start the recovery process.  I say 'tried' because the website message indicated that the authenticator was giving incorrect information.  Fuck me running!  I called Blizzard  who had 52 min hold time, but I was still able to log into WoW, so I put in a ticket.  The ticket wait time: 7 days.  Damn, damn, damn.  So while on hold, I read through lots of stuff trying to find a fix, as well as Gugi looking for something he had read.  So 45 min in to my 52 min hold, I find a post about resyncing the authenticator.  I was desperate, so why not.  So simple, and yes, it fixed my error.  So I hung up the phone, cancelled my ticket, and logged back in.  The stupid thing about this?  I don't know why I was scrambling so much.  It's not that I can't get hacked, but I have astronomically cut down the chances.  Along with that, if it were to ever happen, items can be restored.  So I don't know.  I feel like a dipshit about it now, but I sure as hell didn't then.  lol

So yeah, looking forward to get into the next level of difficulty.  I haven't trying the public thing yet, perhaps I will this go around.  I'm really bad about tunneling into a game and becoming oblivious to everything else, so... I don't know.  If I have missed messages from anyone, this is probably why. :)

Here are some interesting facts from the post Game Design Update:

On average, players have created 3 characters each

80% of characters are between levels 1 and 30

1.9% of characters have unlocked Inferno difficulty

54% of Hardcore players chose a female character

The majority of Hardcore deaths (35%) occur in Act I Normal

The most common level 60 build in the game is only used by 0.7% of level 60 characters of that class (not including Passive diversity)

The most used runes for each class at level 60 are Barbarian: Best Served Cold, Demon Hunter: Lingering Fog, Wizard: Mirror Skin, Monk: Peaceful Repose, Witch Doctor: Numbing Dart

I just realized that I didn't revise all that much, just talked about my error fiasco, but it's all cool.  The game is awesome and I can see playing it for a good long while